LabVIEW rapid prototype built medical equipment

The 21st century is the century of the life and health, life sciences and the rapid progress constantly promoting human health and the disease itself, how to develop an innovative healthcare electronic equipment has become one of the focuses of the study.

Medical device research content involves many engineering research fields such as electronics, computer, information processing, optics, precision mechanics, etc.

With the medical treatment of the development, diversification and related engineering field technology continues to progress, medical electronic devices are becoming increasingly complex. General major medical device composed of multiple subsystems, the need to integrate a variety of sensors, machinery parts, electronic components, such as FPGA or microprocessor, etc, but also involves a variety of professional bus and the Protocol, its research and development cycle is quite long and may take 2 years to 3 years or even longer. So, how to shorten the whole medical electronic equipment system development time, improve the innovation degree will be market elements.

For some small companies, from fierce competition in a firm foothold and stand out is a very difficult thing.

Their core technical personnel may be experts in the field of biology and medicine, and master a certain patent or research results, but how do I in team personnel very limited circumstances, fast will patent or research results into products, and to guarantee product reliability and stability are very difficult. Therefore in the highly competitive medical electronics market, enabling rapid prototyping is the key. From another perspective, for universities, research institutes or the company's research and development institutions, they must focus on the future, have a forward-looking and innovative equipment research and development, so that researchers need to be concerned about how quickly some algorithm or theoretical research results for authentication, and to further build out the actual system until the products of their own research projects or patent industrialization, gets more support to enter into a virtuous circle.

To sum up, for medical electronics equipment developers, system itself in electronic, mechanical, sensors and other aspects of complexity and the demand of market competition, how to quickly prototype validation of research results and products of a leading to the market.

Through a unified platform to rapidly build prototype systems

System development generally can be divided into design, prototype verification, release of three phases.

Design phase for the product itself and which involves the concept of the algorithm, is a prototype verification; design of feasibility for validation or assessment; publication is the product of the final implementation. The main tasks during the design phase is determined by the development team in the biomedical, signal processing, image processing specialists or researchers use text and mathematical tools for algorithm or system design. Prototype verification phase, the main task is to be implemented on a hardware platform and verify designing algorithms and assess to further adjust the algorithm, this task is usually made with electronic engineering background of embedded system developers, VxWorks, QNX, Linux and embedded operating systems to be completed, they are using software tools and hardware platform directly related, such as CCS, VHDL, VDSP ++, etc. In general the two stages of developers and development platform is different, so the prototype phase of the developer must seamlessly design phase to attract and convert the results, if the system requirements needed to be amended or algorithm design some errors that will result in a large number of amendments to the prototype phase of the work and even rework. Therefore, the entire system development is a loop of the progressive process.

In order to reduce both the number of times between iterative stage, many development teams have taken sides move closer to each other, ask on the front of the algorithm designers on the hardware and the underlying programming have a certain understanding upfront embedded system developers also need to have some background in biology and medicine.

In this way, to a certain extent, to let the two stages between greater communication, but for developers of requirements is higher, but the lack of systematic, along with medical electronic systems became increasingly complex, cannot fundamentally solve the problem.

A more fundamental solution is to put these two phases of the transplantations to the unified development platform, which is a development platform integration algorithms and hardware: on the one hand, the introduction in algorithm design phase early hardware i/o for validation, you can find at an earlier stage and fix potential errors; on the other hand, uses the same algorithm design development environment, code can prototype verification process to be reused, thus simplifying the programming complexity, lowers the algorithm design and embedded developers, radically speed up the circulation of the progressive process, thereby reducing the system's development time.

LabVIEW: quickly build medical electronic prototype graphical platform

LabVIEW graphical development platform since its inception in 1986, has been working to simplify the complexity of the programming, the graphical programming has also become standard development tools.

For the development of medical electronics, LabVIEW provides hardware I/O introduced algorithm design, and through code reuse and commercialization, to publish embedded prototyping platform that simplifies the complexity of building a prototype system.

Interactive algorithm design emphasis on code reuse

Over the past few years, LabVIEW has extensibility into a variety of algorithms for design to better meet the needs of research and design staff.

In addition to the powerful graphical programming style, the LabVIEW now also includes a text-based math programming tools, continuous-time simulation, state diagrams and a graphical control design and simulation, model, to represent various algorithms and applications. At the same time, for digital filter and control models, digital signal processing algorithm development of interactive tools for the introduction of the medical electronics related algorithm design easier.

Signal processing is a lot of medical electronic systems critical parts, through LabVIEW and associated kits, designers can function by calling the out-of-the-box, quickly finish for example remove baseline drift, noise reduction, QRS detection, signal extraction applications, etc.

ByInteractive Quick VI (Virtual Instrument), as long as the menu is set to parameter to complete the Kaiser window FIR high-pass filter design to remove baseline drift. In order to further processing, or you can call the advanced signal processing toolkit-mania in Wavelet functions to filter out broadband noise.

For example, the fetal heart signal extraction and other more complex processing, developers can also use LabVIEW in ICA (ICA) algorithm to be applied.

As shown in Figure 1, the upper part is collected from the mother and the fetal heart's mixed-signal, and the bottom half is ICA after separation of the fetal heart rate signals.

At the same time, developers can also use LabVIEW built-in text mathematical tools to reuse existing algorithms, such as using the Mathscript node called MATLAB in development of .m file, and an interactive environment through LabVIEW on algorithm validation debugging, so with a variety of advanced mathematical and software integration.

With the introduction of the hardware i/o and fix potential problems found

As mentioned, if the system needs to be amended or algorithm design errors that will result in a large number of amendments to the prototype phase of the work and even rework.

So a solution is earlier to real-world signals and hardware into the design process, resulting in an early stage discovery and fix potential problems.

LabVIEW platform the most obvious value in algorithm design and hardware I/O a bridge is established between.

LabVIEW through the introduction of the i/o signals, and the design process and various advanced math and design software integration to help engineers to quickly add real-world data and theoretical models, thus enabling interactive design process faster, design time shorter.

Physical measurements and design and simulation completely different challenges, requirements and a wide range of measurement and control hardware tightly integrated, and to optimize the performance of processing a large number of channel data or high speed throughput.

LabVIEW through constant evolution, in physical measurement areas providing extremely high performance and flexibility to work with hundreds of data acquisition equipment and thousands of instruments and seamless integration.

Through code reuse and commercial platform to rapidly build prototypes

Most embedded systems developers currently using prototype evaluation board for system prototyping, but the prototype Board often only have a small number of analog and digital i/o channels, the also very little support for Visual, motor or synchronization capabilities.

In addition, only for the design concept of validation, designers often need special sensor or support special I/O and spends a lot of time and development resources to develop custom prototype Board.

To simplify this process, and remove the hardware verification and Board-level design amount work using flexible, commercialization of prototype platform becomes more and more embedded systems developers.

But for most systems, and prototyping platform must include the final release of the same parts, such as execution algorithms, real-time processor, used for high speed processing of programmable logic devices, or real-time processor interfaces connected to other parts. Therefore, if the commercial system does not meet all the requirements, so this prototyping platform must be scalable and supports custom. NI offers a variety of hardware platforms and LabVIEW integration, complete design, prototype verification to the publishing of the whole process. For example using LabVIEW and NI repeatable configuration I/O (RIO) equipment or NI CompactRIO platform, you can quickly and easily create a prototype of medical electronic devices.

Rapid prototype build instance: liquid nitrogen tumor therapy instrument

Medical device manufacturer Sanarus plans to develop an innovation-surgical equipment Visica2 (V2), implementation of the treatment process includes painless anesthesia, real-time ultrasound lesion localization and minimally invasive surgery.

To keep up with the product release schedule, the developers plan for four months to develop a working prototype of the system. In addition, under the investor demands, as soon as possible to achieve production to meet market needs.

Prepare the firmware for your device in General and to develop a custom circuit board cycle is very long.

Once the firmware or software layer problems will cause additional delays thus affecting the progress of your project. In addition since v2 is medical equipment that requires that the device must not contain any prejudicial to the performance of the system firmware and software errors; if not through 510 (k) certification required expendable test, the entire project will fail. Based on these requirements, you need a very reliable development programmes.

Because both integrated I/O development and programming features, CompactRIO is considered a flexible programme.

CompactRIO system consists of a 400 MHz processor, Ethernet controller, as well as the back panel of the 3 million Gates FPGA, LabVIEW FPGA Module can be on the back panel of the FPGA programming. Because LabVIEW FPGA is a graphical programming environment, biomedical engineers without VHDL experience can participate directly in the programming work. They can run in embedded controllers and liquid nitrogen pump pure resistive heating parts of control algorithm that management and control in the FPGA devices necessary input/output signals of interface, this resource allocation allows the construction of the prototype and the final system posted in the programming model is very similar to on. CompactRIO benefits clearly, the use of customized programmes need a few months time, NI programme took only a few weeks.

In addition, if you use the custom firmware, once the new demand will lead to cumbersome update process.

After using CompactRIO platform, code modifications become very easily. As the development platform is very flexible, as new functional requirements, the development process without delay. In addition, because the CompacTRIO has passed the EMC certification, this also ensures that when the prototype validation, regardless of the specialized design of EMC-related.

Summary

LabVIEW graphical development platform by providing design, prototype from algorithm to authenticate to a product launch, from software debugging and functional testing to production testing of unified environment that allows engineers and researchers can be on the same platform for product design and development, reduce cycle development and code correction, thereby speeding up the design process.

At the same time, through the CompactRIO embedded prototyping platforms, researchers can quickly be patent or research results into products, and to guarantee product reliability and stability, thus shortening the development of medical electronic devices.