Smartphone-based portable ultrasound imaging system: A primary result

There is a growing need of portable ultrasound imaging systems since it can allow clinicians to access and diagnose a patient at the scene of an accident or at the patient´s bedside due to their improved accessibility. Portable ultrasound imaging systems have been developed based on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). However, this ASIC approach is typically beneficial to well-defined targeted applications such that its usefulness for POC systems would be limited. The recent advance in application processors (APs) and graphics processing units embedded in smartphones can facilitate smartphone-based portable ultrasound imaging systems. In this paper, the feasibility of the smartphone-based portable ultrasound imaging system is demonstrated where the high-end Android smartphone (i.e., Samsung´s Galaxy Note II) is used for performing core ultrasound B-mode signal and image processing (e.g., quadrature demodulation and scan conversion). The ultrasound B-mode image reconstructed from the Android smartphone where an 850×800 image is reconstructed and displayed. The total execution time to perform core functional blocks for 128-scanline, 512-sample data is about 520 milliseconds.