Medical Design Briefs - September 2021 - 21

TECHNOLOGY LEADERS Electronics
FPGA Technology for
High-Speed Medical Image Processing
D
etecting breast cancer early and
minimizing false positives can
make a critical difference in
women's healthcare. Through
better detection, digital mammography
can significantly improve radiology outcomes.
Analogic,
a developer of direct conversion
digital detector technology,
makes advanced digital mammography
available by developing and manufacturing
flat-panel, direct conversion digital
detectors used by major medical OEMs
in mammography systems. By enabling
digital tomosynthesis, Analogic's detector
technology provides a 3D image for
improved reading accuracy and reduced
false positives compared with traditional
2D film mammography.
To speed development of the next
generation of digital mammography de -
tectors, Analogic needed specific technical
expertise to use high-performance
image processing algorithms with its
patented detection technology.
Challenge: Meet various market needs
for advanced digital mammography
image processing. As a premium mammography
detection technology provider,
Analogic needed to incorporate
technically advanced image processing
capabilities into a versatile new solution
as quickly as possible. Because Analogic
detectors are used on a range of equipment
made by different manufacturers,
the new system architecture design had
to offer ease of integration and reuse to
support multiple applications over an
extended product life cycle (see Figure
1). The company also needed a solution
that would allow older x-ray equipment
to use its detector.
Solution: Collaborate with Orthogone
to provide field programmable gate array
(FPGA) technical expertise and speed
development. Analogic brought Ortho -
gone in as a partner to provide technical
expertise and accelerate the development
cycle. With experienced FPGA designers,
embedded software designers, and hardware
designers, the Orthogone team
helped to develop the scalability that the
Medical Design Briefs, September 2021
Intro
Cov
Digital mammography can significantly improve radiology outcomes by detecting breast cancer early and minimizing
false positives. (Credit: Orthogone Technologies Inc.)
Analogic team needed to achieve their
product development goals.
" Our aim is to maintain our lead in
the premium market for mammography
detectors. In order to do that, we need
high-speed communications from the
detectors, and that's definitely an area
where we knew that Orthogone could
help us. They brought expertise, especially
in anything having to do with digital
design, memory configuration, and
FPGA programming, " says François
Boucher, director of engineering at
Analogic Canada.
Developing a state-of-the-art digital
platform for medical imaging applications
presented many multi-disciplinary
technological challenges.
System Design and Architecture
System designers had to integrate
extremely sensitive sensors with highspeed
digital processing capabilities
onto a highly integrated low-profile
enclosure. Large-area flat panels often
www.medicaldesignbriefs.com
ToC
+
-
A
µ
combine multiple sensors to form a larger
high-resolution image, with highspeed
links used to transfer the raw
image data. In this case, the mammography
sensors were divided into multiple
independent sections that could each
use multiple high-speed LVDS differential
pairs to transfer their raw acquisition
data. Data is sent to independent lowpower
Xilinx Artix-7 FPGAs
installed
around an MPSoC located in the center
of the PCBA.
In this design, the Xilinx Zynq Ultra -
Scale+ MPSoC integrates the Kintex
UltraScale+ FPGA programmable fabric
onto a single device with a processing
system (PS) that includes a 64-bit dualcore
Arm®
Cortex®
-A53 and a dual-core
Arm Cortex-R5. The architecture was
designed to benefit from the FPGA fabric
performances and multiple ARM
cores flexibility, some of which can be
used with operating systems that need to
be certified for critical applications
required in the healthcare industry. The
21
È

http://www.medicaldesignbriefs.com

Medical Design Briefs - September 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Medical Design Briefs - September 2021