Configurable Pipelined Datapath for Data Acquisition in Interventional Computed Tomography

In this paper, we present a novel Configurable Pipelined Datapath for custom Data Acquisition Systems (DASs) in the context of Interventional Computed Tomography (iCT). The introduction of new medical techniques during surgery results in a multitude of challenging requirements on the hardware architecture (e.g., real-time data processing, high data-rate, hard deadline on data acquisition and storage). Therefore, we propose a Pipelined Datapath for System-on-Chip FPGAs, that can be configured at design time and run time. It supports all data processing steps from the detector sensors’ data acquisition to the image-processing reconstruction system. It can be configured, depending on the CT physical limitations and the medical scenarios. Besides, the Pipelined Datapath avoids any buffering on off-chip memory, differently from other architectures in literature.