MedTech Frontiers - February Seminar

Speaker:      Augustus P. Lowell
Director/Principle Engineer
Triple Ring Technologies, Inc

High Performance Medical Imaging Applications of ATCA

Triple Ring Technologies is pioneering the use of Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA®, or ATCA) in medical applications. The ATCA and its cousin (or μTCA™), are standards developed by the PICMG Consortium.

Among ATCA’s objectives are: 

  • Enable reduced development time and costs
  • Support reduced total cost of ownership
  • Support a rich mix of processors and integrate with multiple network elements
  • Offer high levels of modularity and configurability
  • Support appropriate scalability of System performance and capacity

ATCA is aimed at large-scale installations like switching centers, while μTCA adapts many of the ATCA features for small-scale installations and prototyping. ATCA has been widely adopted within the telecommunications industry and is now being adapted to non-telecommunication applications.

Triple Ring Technologies is using the ATCA platform as the basis for the data processing and control components of a new Cardiac Imaging system, the ScanCath™ , which processes sensor data in real-time at a rate of approximately 40Gb/s.  The imaging system and the data processing components designed into the ATCA platform, including adaptations unique to this application are described in this presentation.

More details (published IEEE article) on this application were presented at the 2008 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium in a workshop dedicated to the use of the ATCA standard in high-energy and imaging physics applications.  ATCA is well-suited to the instrumentation needs of large-scale projects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) because of its high bandwidth capabilities, scalability, and module management features.

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