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RE S E A RCH S C ANNER The world’s most powerful ultrasound scanner SARUS, Center for Fast Ultrasound Imaging’s research scanner at DTU Electrical Engineering, is the first of its kind in the world and the only instrument yet created that can display the movement of blood in 3D. “Using SARUS, you can create a 3D image of the flow through all sections of the heart, for example. It is already possible to display 3D ultrasound images that show length, width and depth at the same time, but the blood flow rate can only be shown in one direction. What we are seeing now is that we can identify the blood flow rate in all directions at any point on the image. This is a unique capability!” relates Professor Jørgen Arendt Jensen, Head of the Center for Fast Ultrasound Imaging (CFU). With support from the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation (please see box on p. 34), he and his research group have developed SARUS in collaboration with the companies Prevas and BK Medical. SARUS is linked to what is called a ‘transducer’, a little handheld unit that is used to transmit ultrasound into the body. It features 1,024 channels that can send and receive sound—rather more than ordinary commercial transducers that typically operate 192 channels. Simply put, SARUS and the transducer can measure everything. “When you work with SARUS and a 2D array transducer like this, you can transmit and receive anything. So when we measure a blood vessel, we receive a complete data set that we then send down to the basement for processing. Here we have the equivalent of 400 PC processors. This allows us to find the flow in all directions and process all results from the area scanned,” explains Professor Jørgen Arendt Jensen. 25 trillion calculations When you record sound waves from more than 1,000 channels at the same time, it generates a truly staggering volume of data. In fact, it corresponds to recording somewhere around 70,000 TV channels simultaneously. SARUS is so big because it contains 64 Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), each of which can transmit and receive from 16 channels. Under each of the small ‘cooling towers’ on the PCBs, there is a parallel processor (what is known as a ‘Field Programmable Gate Array’ or ‘FGA’) with 160 units that perform the calculations. Each of these units can carry out 500 million multiplications per second, which means that 80 billion multiplications per second can be performed under each cooling tower. With 300 parallel processors, the number of possible calculations per second reaches more than 25 trillion— equivalent to the processing power of 5,000 ordinary computers. However, it is not just the processing power that makes SARUS the most powerful ultrasound research scanner in the world. The units can also be programmed separately and function independently of each other. >> 40 Technical University of Denmark


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