A NEW DIGITAL SCAN CONVERSION ARCHITECTURE FOR ULTRASONIC IMAGING SYSTEMS

Abstract

Digital scan conversion (DSC) is the process of converting received ultrasound signals, or echoes, in multi-scan lines, at varying angles (polar coordinate), to a Cartesian raster format for displaying. In this paper, we propose a new DSC technique that uses nearest-neighbor interpolation and the linear interpolation between adjacent scan lines to reduce artifacts on the far field, with smaller angular separation between the interpolated lines. A hardware implementation is described that uses only a FIFO register and a display memory. Rapid prototyping using an ARM processor with FPGA resources is achieved to validate the operation of the described system. Experimental results of the implemented design demonstrated the expected operation of the reduced complexity architecture in term of needed memory. Also, the performance of retrieved images were increased.