The experimental ultrasound system SARUS is a platform designed in house on which new ultrasound imaging methods can be implemented and evaluated.
It consists of 1024 independent transmit channels and 1024 independent receive channels, allowing it to fully utilize two-dimensional ultrasound transducers. The sampling is performed at 70 MHz and 12 bits, so the system can continuously sample data at a rate of 140 GB/s.
It houses more than 320 GB of RAM and communicates between boards on 64 1 GBit Ethernet links. Data can be processed in real time on the 320 large FPGAs each housing 160 18 bits multipliers running at 1/2 GHz for a combined output of 20,480 billion multiplications/s. Each FPGA can send more than 10 Gbit of data/s to provide real-time images for live preview of the scanned area, using synthetic aperture imaging technique to achieve very high image quality.
The change between preview mode and experimental imaging with saving of data is quick, so that clinical trials can be conveniently implemented. Data can also be stored for off-line processing through four 10 Gbit Ethernet links on the CFU storage cluster.
Up to 4 users can simultaneously conduct experiments using the SARUS hardware.
