METHOD FOR REDUCING INFORMATION OF ULTRASOUND RF SIGNALS IN REAL TIME

A method and architecture for reducing the information of ultrasound signals in real time based on a parallel processing by hardware, a method which uses the digital data of a RF ultrasound signal acquired with an ultrasound equipment for reducing, in real time, the amount of memory required for storing the relevant information of said signal, said information corresponding to the time of flight and length of the echoes detected in the RF ultrasound. A gate arrangement programmed in FPGA field is used for implementing the architecture that performs the process for reducing the information of the RF ultrasound signal in real time. The method consists in identifying the type of transducer to be used, according to this information a bandpass filter with a central frequency equal to the response frequency of the transducer is defined, then the filtered signal being rectified and being filtered once again using a bandpass filter for obtaining an envelop comprising a soft line; simultaneous ly the maxima soft envelop signal, corresponding to the occurrence time of each echo and the amplitude thereof, are searched, characterised and counted, for finally storing only the number of maxima detected and the pairs ordered by time-amplitude of each maximum detected in the RF ultrasound signal. This reduction method defines a novel processing architecture in real time by hardware, which does not require large amounts of energy, the same being compact (a single chip) and mainly acquiring a RF ultrasound signal while reducing a further RF ultrasound signal obtained in a previous acquisition time and storing the result obtained from other RF ultrasound signal obtained two previous acquisition times, thereby a single processor continuously acquiring the RF ultrasound signal, reducing it and storing the result of said reduction in order to obtain a real time processing. Un método y arquitectura para reducción de información de señales de ultrasonido en tiempo real basado en procesamiento en paralelo por hardware, un método que a partir de los datos digitales de una señal RF de ultrasonido, adquirida con un equipo de ultrasonido, puede reducir en tiempo real la cantidad de memoria requerida para almacenar la información relevante de dicha señal, dicha información corresponden al tiempo de vuelo y la amplitud de los ecos detectados en la señal RF de ultrasonido. Un arreglo de compuertas programables en campo FPGA es utilizado para implementar la arquitectura que realiza el pro