Mobile ultrasound plane wave beamforming on iPhone or iPad using metal-based GPU processing

Mobile and cost effective ultrasound devices are being used in point of care scenarios or the drama room. To reduce the costs of such devices we already presented the possibilities of consumer devices like Apple iPad for full signal processing of raw data for ultraound image generation. Using technologies like plane wave imaging to generate a full image with only one excitation/reception event the acquisition times and power consumption of ultrasound imaging can be reduced for low power mobile devices based on consumer electronics realizing the transition from FPGA or ASIC based beamforming into more flexible software beamforming. The massive parallel beamforming process can be done with the Apple framework "Metal" for advanced graphics and general purpose GPU processing for the iOS platform. We were able to integrate the beamforming reconstruction into our mobile ultrasound processing application with imaging rates up to 70 Hz on iPad Air 2 hardware.