As hinted at in our last blog post, there are a number of limitations with our first generation Open Image system. Given that we built an ultrasound machine from the ground up, this is not surprising. Here’s our honest assessment of the current state of the system:
Challenges and Oppurtunities
Phantom Results
Ultrasound phantoms are as close to the “gold standard” for evaluating imaging system performance as there is. Our collaborators at the UIUC Bioacoustics Research Lab sent us one of their ATS539 phantoms. Here’s a photograph of our test setup.
Customized Waveforms
One of the benefits of the Open Image platform is the ability to fully customize your transmit waveforms. Our pulser allows for five different amplitude settings (-V_2, -V_1, 0, +V_1, +V_2, where, for our system, V_2 = 80 V and V_1 = 40 V) sampled at 220 MHz.
It's Alive!
Success! Today, we got our open source ultrasound electronics working for the first time.