SCIENCE

Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) announced support of its free, easy-to-use medical imaging software toolkit (STK), a collection of powerful imaging algorithms targeted for TI’s industry leading TMS320C66x digital signal processors (DSP) generation. Complementing TI’s full portfolio of analog and embedded processing solutions for real-time medical imaging, the upgraded toolkit offers image processing kernels for applications such as diagnostic ultrasound and optical coherence tomography (OCT), where high computational performance at low power levels and clear image quality are important.

“Our upgraded toolkit offers medical imaging developers a cost-effective software solution and unprecedented levels of performance,” said Ramesh Kumar, business manager, multicore and media infrastructure, Texas Instruments. “With our free STK 3.0, easy-to-program KeyStone multicore architecture and powerful C66x DSP core, we are enabling developers to much more easily design medical imaging products with a significantly shortened development time.”

Leveraging the sophisticated processing capabilities of TI’s C66x DSP and KeyStone multicore architecture, the STK 3.0 enables both B-mode and color-flow processing for ultrasound, as well as key kernels like real-to-complex fast Fourier transform (FFT) and cubic spline interpolation for OCT. Software programmability in TI’s C66x DSPs can allow for code reuse across systems, from portable to high-end applications, and easy adaptability across a variety of clinical applications. For example, since OCT’s clinical use in ophthalmology, newer applications have also emerged in cardiology, oncology, surgery and many other specialties.