PARALLEL IMAGE-RECONSTRUCTION IN REAL-TIME ULTRASOUND PROCESS TOMOGRAPHY FOR 2-PHASED FLOW MEASUREMENTS

This paper investigates different parallel-processing architectures as a means of achieving real-time ultrasound tomographic imaging capabil ity. The real-time numerical image reconstruction is implemented by a parallel processor network and DSP controlled data acquisition electro nics. The parallel imaging technique developed for the present work ha s been shown to be capable of achieving the necessary real-time image generation rate (100 frames per second on a 100 x 100 image array for software image reconstruction) and an average update frequency of 30 f rames per second when acquiring data from the hardware. The parallel i mage processing algorithm which combines geometric and algorithmic par allelism aiming at optimizing the parallel efficiency of the processor s of the array has been implemented and verified. The experimental ima ging results generated by the parallel imaging system are presented an d the dynamic performance of the parallel system are discussed. (C) 19 97 Academic Press Limited.