A graphic processing unit based intravascular ultrasound (IVUS)

A practical intravascular ultrasound system prototype is presented. The system is designed to work in compliance with high frequency interventional ultrasound imaging catheter, which has a center frequency as high as 60MHz. Differ from former architecture, a graphic processing unit is utilized as a primary processing component to accomplish most of the crucial computations in this machine, based on which, real time algorithm verification becomes much easier. This paper explains the motivation to start the project, introduces the hardware architecture that have been adopted and specifies the processing flow cooperate with this architecture. The time budget of experimental algorithm running on this prototype is analyzed and few images obtained with it are illustrated.