FPGA Acceleration of Image Reconstruction for Real-Time Photoacoustic Tomography

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel FPGA-based acceleration technique for photoacoustic image reconstruction, achieving 20-60 times faster processing with significantly lower power consumption, enabling real-time imaging in clinical settings.

Contribution

The study introduces the first FPGA acceleration method for PA image reconstruction, compatible with common algorithms, drastically improving speed and energy efficiency.

Findings

Achieved 20-60x faster reconstruction speed

Reduced power consumption from dozens to 1-2 Watts

Demonstrated feasibility with in-vivo human finger experiments

Abstract

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging has been widely applied in both preclinical and clinical applications. With a significantly increasing number of data acquisition channels, fast and high-quality image reconstruction for real-time PA imaging is an open challenge in this community. In this paper, we propose a FPGA-accelerated method to achieve a much faster image reconstruction speed by 20~60 times compared with using CPU, with much-reduced system cost and power budget, from dozens of Watt (CPU) to 1~2 Watt (FPGA). Equivalently, the energy efficiency ratio (EER) is improved by ~1000 times. This FPGA acceleration method can be easily adapted to the most widely used algorithms, such as delay-and-sum (DAS) and its variants (e.g. DMAS, DAS-CF). We have performed in-vivo human finger experiments to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed method. To our best knowledge, this is the first study of accelerating PA image reconstruction based on FPGA platform.