In our Advanced Technology Foundation project “FutureSonic”, we recently presented two papers at the 2014 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium together with our research partners at the Technical University of Denmark.
The first paper [1] presents how ultrasound images can be computed efficiently on GPUs and on multicore CPUs that support Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) extensions. We were able to accelerate a reference implementation in C from around 700 ms/frame to 5.4 ms/frame using the same multicore CPU. The speedup was achieved primarily by optimizing the memory access patterns and by utilizing AVX instructions. On a high-end GPU the fastest computation time was less than 0.5 ms/frame.
The results obtained above were utilized in the second paper [2] where the GPU implementation was ported to mobile devices. We showed that modern mobile GPUs provide enough computing power to produce ultrasound images in real-time. Furthermore, we showed that the WiFi throughput is sufficient for real-time reception of raw data from a wireless ultrasound trandsucer.
References
[1] Synthetic Aperture Sequential Beamforming implemented on multi-core platforms
IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS), p2181 – 2184 (2014)
IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS), p2177 – 2180 (2014)
