Cephasonics announced the first version of their Ontario OEM ultrasound carts designed to provide a complete integrated solution for ultrasound medical product developers. The Ontario carts are application-ready and designed for companies wanting to bring clinical ultrasound applications to market more quickly with a complete hardware solution.
Cephasonics founder and CEO, Richard Tobias stated, “This new cart expands Cephasonics ultrasound solutions and for the first time provides a complete integrated application-ready solution. This further helps our customers to develop and commercialize new clinical ultrasound solutions more quickly and easily.”
The base level Ontario systems will come equipped with a Cephasonics 64-channel ultrasound engine with 3:1 muxing, an Intel-based I7 computer controller with an Nvidia GPU, solid state storage, Cephasonics CuSDK ultrasound software platform, Linux operating system, and a 27” medical touch screen monitor -- all built into a medically-approved cart.
The first Ontario cart-based 64-channel systems will be available for order starting in Q4 of 2022 with a starting price of $49,500 in single quantities.
Ultrasound System Capabilities
The Cephasonics ultrasound engine is a precision and very flexible embedded system that provides fine-grain control of transmit and receive parameters for channel capture and beamforming modes of operations including transmit wave definition, transmit/receive delays and weights and probe mux configuration per firing.
The ultrasound engines also feature user-configurable input and output triggering to synchronize ultrasound firing with external systems along with fully programmable AFE and TGC parameters, and depth-based frequency tracking demodulation and decimation filtering (TFC). You can use the systems for B-mode, harmonic imaging, doppler modes, including CFM, PDI and PWD, and M-mode with data rates to 3.6Gbps over PCI-express v1.1 (x4) and Frame rates of up to 28fps over USB 2.0 interface at 20cm depth. The systems provide resolution of lateral 0.5mm, axial 0.5mm, geometrical precision of 0.1mm or 1 pixel, spatial compounding, multi focal zone (max 4 zones) , multi frequency, scan angles from 0 deg to 150 deg, at 1 deg increments, and image depth of 1mm to 30cm.
Ultrasound Transmit functions provide for 256 pulse shape entries and each 248 pulses at 160MHz, 8192 sample long pulses for “chirp” signal, output pulse rates of 100Hz to 40MHz, a pulse repetition counter 1..32, pulse duty cycle adjustment to 6.125ns precision, and arbitrary wave form definition. The transmit aperture definition provides arbitrary channel enabling and apodization F# of 1/16..16. The transmit delay resolution is 6.125ns and provides for 3-level or 5-level pulser configurations. The output (at 5MHz) is 25ps with phase Noise (at 5MHz, 1KHz offset) of −116 dBc/Hz
Receive functions include a 12-bit 68.5dBFS, 10.5 ENOB ADC with an ultra-low 2.4dB noise figure, an input frequency range of 1MHz to 18MHz, a sampling rate of 20MHz and 40MHz, and close-in phase-noise (at 1KHz offset from 3.5MHz carrier) of -140dBc/Hz. Channel capture features 8K samples per channel buffer, a programmable high pass filter, and a programmable decimation filter. Beamforming provides for continuous receive focus and apodization with delay and weight coefficients updated on every sample. It also provides for 1 and 2 beam parallel processing, preset window functions and programmable time frequency control in 32 zones.
Cephasonics is a worldwide supplier of precision real-time ultrasound systems for product development and embedded OEM applications. Cephasonics’ technology powers innovation in the design and development of next-generation medical ultrasound imaging solutions.
Cephasonics’ open architecture and flexible embedded-ultrasound provides unique access to comprehensive scanning data for AI applications. They also provide open development tools that empowers customers to quickly create and commercialize innovative new procedure-specific ultrasound applications and products that can locate, recognize, quantify, and characterize structures in the body providing doctors real-time information during medical procedures.
Cephasonics is creating new approaches to how and where ultrasound can be used to provide doctors real-time information during medical procedures. Cephasonics provides hardware and software platforms that enable new procedure-specific ultrasound applications that uses data and AI to recognize, quantify and characterize structures in the body in real-time.
Ontario, Itasca, Echo-64, cQuest™ Embedded-Ultrasound Platform, cQuest™ CUSDK and cQuest™ Ultrasound Products are all trademarks of Cephasonics in the United States and/or other countries.
