MSDLab
Laboratorio Progettazione Sistemi Elettronici
MCMG
MULTI-CHANNEL MULTI-GATE (MCMG) SYSTEM - BUBBLE BEHAVIOR TESTING (BBT) SYSTEM
An electronic board including the transmit-receive (TX-RX) circuits necessary to finely control 1 or 2 single-element transducers has been originally developed within the EU funded UMEDS Project, for application in peripheral vascular applications. The acronym MCMG reflects the capability of simultaneously controlling Multiple Channels (each corresponding to one transducer) and Multiple RX Gates for each channel.
The MCMG instrument has been selected by CORDIS for special promotion in their 'Technology Marketplace'
The board has also been customized, by introducing, in particular, special low-noise, highly sensitive Rx circuits, to match the specific needs of ultrasound contrast agents characterization. The new version of the board, shown suitable for characterization of individual microbubbles, is identified as Bubble Behaviour Testing (BBT) system.
The architecture of the system includes a digital section based on a state-of-the art field programmable gate array (FPGA, Stratix Altera Family, San Jose, CA) and a floating point Digital Signal Processor (DSP) from TMS320C67’ family (Texas Instruments, Austin, TX). The FPGA contains an arbitrary waveform generator that can simultaneously synthesize two programmable excitation bursts with bandwidth in the range 1-15 MHz. These signals are converted to analog at 64 Msps, amplified and applied to two independent single element transducers. The received radio-frequency echoes, after being conditioned through band pass filters and programmable amplifiers, are sampled at 64 Msps by 14-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADC). The FPGA demodulates and filters the echo-samples to generate the in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) signal components. The DSP processes in real-time the demodulated data
See also:
- S. Ricci, E. Boni, F. Guidi, T. Morganti and P. Tortoli, A Programmable Real-Time System for Development and Test of New Ultrasound Investigation Methods, IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr., vol. 53, no. 10, pp. 1813-1819, 2006.
- F. Guidi, H. Vos, R. Mori, N. de Jong, P. Tortoli, Microbubble characterization through acoustically-induced deflation, IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr., 57:1, pp. 193-202, 2010.
- S. Ricci, M. Liard, B. Birkhofer, D. Lootens, A. Brühwiler, P.Tortoli. Embedded Doppler System for Industrial in-Line Rheometry. IEEE Trans. on Ultrason. Ferroel and Freq. Control (ISSN:0885-3010), 1395 - 1401, 59(7), 2012
- J. Viti, R. Mori, F. Guidi, M. Versluis, N. de Jong, and P. Tortoli, Nonlinear Oscillations of Deflating Bubbles, IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr., 59:12, 2012, p.2818-2824