Boni Enrico, Yu Alfred C H, Freear Steven, Jensen Jorgen Arendt, Tortoli Piero
IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2018 Jul;65(7):1078-1092. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2018.2844560.
Open platform (OP) ultrasound systems are aimed primarily at the research community. They have been at the forefront of the development of synthetic aperture, plane wave, shear wave elastography, and vector flow imaging. Such platforms are driven by a need for broad flexibility of parameters that are normally preset or fixed within clinical scanners. OP ultrasound scanners are defined to have three key features including customization of the transmit waveform, access to the prebeamformed receive data, and the ability to implement real-time imaging. In this paper, a formative discussion is given on the development of OPs from both the research community and the commercial sector. Both software- and hardware-based architectures are considered, and their specifications are compared in terms of resources and programmability. Software-based platforms capable of real-time beamforming generally make use of scalable graphics processing unit architectures, whereas a common feature of hardware-based platforms is the use of field-programmable gate array and digital signal processor devices to provide additional on-board processing capacity. OPs with extended number of channels (>256) are also discussed in relation to their role in supporting 3-D imaging technique development. With the increasing maturity of OP ultrasound scanners, the pace of advancement in ultrasound imaging algorithms is poised to be accelerated.
开放平台（OP）超声系统主要面向研究群体。它们处于合成孔径、平面波、剪切波弹性成像和矢量流成像发展的前沿。此类平台是由对参数具有广泛灵活性的需求所驱动的，而这些参数在临床扫描仪中通常是预先设定或固定的。OP超声扫描仪被定义为具有三个关键特性，包括发射波形的定制、对波束形成前接收数据的访问以及实施实时成像的能力。本文对来自研究群体和商业领域的OP的发展进行了建设性讨论。文中考虑了基于软件和硬件的架构，并在资源和可编程性方面对它们的规格进行了比较。能够进行实时波束形成的基于软件的平台通常利用可扩展图形处理单元架构，而基于硬件的平台的一个共同特点是使用现场可编程门阵列和数字信号处理器设备来提供额外的板载处理能力。还讨论了具有扩展通道数（>256）的OP在支持三维成像技术发展方面的作用。随着OP超声扫描仪日益成熟，超声成像算法的进步步伐有望加快。
