CenSSIS: Acoustics Group at Boston University

Analogic Ultrasound Engine (AN 2300)
Matlab Toolbox

Analogic Ultrasound Engine

The Analogic Ultrasound Engine (AN 2300) is a commercial hardware platform which is designed to be incorporated into clinical ultrasound scanners. It is the underlying hardware for the B-K Medical Viking 2400 scanner. The AN2300 can operate standard scanheads with up to 192 elements. It has a fully digital transmit and receive beamforming which can address upto 64 elements in the scanhead in a given pulse-echo A-line. The system is controlled through open-source software which allows complete access to the internal signals and controls within the imager.

The Analogic Engine Toolbox is a collection of MATLAB functions and user interface tools designed to facilate transferring scan line data from Analogic hardware from the real-time engine to MATLAB for visualization and analysis. The core of the toolbox is a set of functions the provide an M interface to many of the functions in the engine SDK, making it possible to write MATLAB functions and scripts to automate initializing, configuring, and collecting data from the engine, or to work with the engine interactively from the command line.

The key Matlab commands are

  • casacc a GUI which allows basic control of the imaging directly from MATLAB
  • casareadrf returns an array containing all the RF lines from a single B-scan image
  • casareadbw returns an array containing all the envelope detected data from a single B-scan image
  • casaTGCParamsRead returns the time-gain compensation (TGC) settings for a given B-scan image

    • Some example files are available at the BU MedBED page and also on the CenSSIS image database.

    Download the Toolbox

    The toolbox can be downloaded as a zipped folder.

    an2300tb.zip

    Unzip the folder and read the file readme.txt for installation instructions.

    Documentation

    Analogic Engine Toolbox 1.0 This includes the instructions for installation and a description of some of the available commands. The use of commands that are not described in this document can be determined using the help command in MATLAB.

    Contributors

  • Patrick Edson, The Mathworks
  • Kenneth Lopez, Electrical Engineering Undergraduate, Boston University and Mathworks Co-op
  • Emmanuel Bossy, Post-doc, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Boston University
  • Robin Cleveland, Assoc. Prof, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Boston University
  • Paul Barbone, Assoc. Prof, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Boston University
  • Ronald Roy, Professor, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Boston University

    • The development of this toolbox was supported by CenSSIS, The Mathworks, and Analogic Corp.

    Physical Acoustics Laboratory
    Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
    110 Cummington Street
    Boston University
    Boston, Massachusetts 02215

    Last Updated Dec 2003
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