Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering
App-based Mobile Ultrasound Systems for iPhone/iPad
Today mobile computing is gaining more importance in medical imaging. Existing mobile ultrasound devices are based on completely integrated dedicated electronics or they provide image display based on preprocessed data transferred from integrated electronics inside the transducer to handheld devices. In both cases the cost of the ultrasound hardware is still very high because beamforming is still done inside the dedicated electronics utilizing lots of expensive hardware resources.
We offer full ultrasound beamforming and signal processing done on mobile consumer devices like tablets or smartphones to reduce the ultrasound hardware cost. This transition of complex logic from dedicated ultrasound hardware to software on consumer electronics offers new possibilities not only in the professional medical imaging device market. It allows us the development of low cost mobile ultrasound applications in general. Our mobile ultrasound devices target this with its highly integrated electronics at different channel count to be used in medical and technical applications.