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1, January 2012
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Design and Implementation of a Smartphone- another consideration is the need for the ultrasound probe
Based Portable Ultrasound Pulsed-Wave to be held by an operator. In other words, a portable Dop-
Doppler Device for Blood Flow Measurement pler ultrasound device with a surface probe is needed for
these applications [12].
Chih-Chung Huang, Po-Yang Lee, Pay-Yu Chen,
Both the principles and the signal processing details
and Ting-Yu Liu
of a pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler system have been intro-
duced in previous papers and textbooks [13]–[20]. Howev-
Abstract—Blood flow measurement using Doppler ultra- er, the performance and miniaturization of a PW system
sound has become a useful tool for diagnosing cardiovascular
can be significantly improved by using novel electronic
diseases and as a physiological monitor. Recently, pocket-sized
ultrasound scanners have been introduced for portable diag- components. Another important issue for a portable Dop-
nosis. The present paper reports the implementation of a por- pler ultrasound device is the need for a real-time spectral
table ultrasound pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler flowmeter using analyzer. Most studies have used the DSP and/or FPGA
a smartphone. A 10-MHz ultrasonic surface transducer was chip to calculate the Doppler spectrograms from flowing
designed for the dynamic monitoring of blood flow velocity.
blood [21]–[23]. However, some additional components
The directional baseband Doppler shift signals were obtained
using a portable analog circuit system. After hardware pro- are needed such as an RF and/or audio analog-to-digital
cessing, the Doppler signals were fed directly to a smartphone converter (ADC), on-board data memory, programmable
for Doppler spectrogram analysis and display in real time. To timer, and LCD graphic display module and its control
the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of the use of circuit (or the connector module for a laptop display) [24],
this system for medical ultrasound Doppler signal processing.
[25]. The idea of using a smartphone to replace these com-
A Couette flow phantom, consisting of two parallel disks with
a 2-mm gap, was used to evaluate and calibrate the device. plex modules is proposed in this study. The smartphone
Doppler spectrograms of porcine blood flow were measured can accordingly be regarded as a novel embedded system
using this stand-alone portable device under the pulsatile con- that contains all of the required units for audio signal and
dition. Subsequently, in vivo portable system verification was image processing. Because a smartphone offers advanced
performed by measuring the arterial blood flow of a rat and
computing ability and a high-quality color display, the
comparing the results with the measurement from a commer-
cial ultrasound duplex scanner. All of the results demonstrated Doppler signals from a PW analog system can be analyzed
the potential for using a smartphone as a novel embedded sys- conveniently for display or storage in real time. Ultra-
tem for portable medical ultrasound applications. sound imaging with a smartphone was performed using a
USB ultrasound probe by Richard et al. [26]. The trans-
ducer elements and electronic circuits were implemented
I. Introduction on a small circuit board inside the probe. Even though
this smartphone-based ultrasound device could provide B-
Fig. 1. Block diagram of smartphone-based portable pulsed-wave Doppler device. The part numbers of used ICs are shown in blocks.
V. Conclusion
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