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Medical Science

Digitizers are playing an increasing role in medical science particularly when fast electronic signals such as those encountered when using ultrasound, lasers and radiation need to be acquired, analyzed and displayed. The ability of digitizers to convert these types of analog signals into digital information which can then be transferred at high-speeds into computers makes them ideal whenever the information needs to be analyzed and quickly presented. Fast medical imaging is being used to improve diagnosis and help detect disease in the fields of radiology, nuclear medicine, ultrasonography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), optical coherence tomography (OCT) and photo-acoustic imaging, dosimetry, positron emission tomography (PET) and other related non-invasive inspection methods.

To cover the broad range and diverse nature of the electronic signals found in medical science Spectrum offers a wide range of digitizers and arbitrary waveform generators. The products are available in a variety of popular standards including PCI, PCIe, PXI and LXI. They offer bandwidths from 50 kHz to 1.5 GHz, sampling rates from 100 KS/s to 5 GS/s, and resolution from 8 up to 16 bits. When large dynamic range and maximum sensitivity is required high-resolution 14 and 16 bit digitizers are available for the capture and analysis of signals that go as high as 250 MHz in frequency. These high-resolution products deliver outstanding signal-to-noise ratio's (up to 72 dB) and spurious free dynamic range (of up to 90 dB) so that small signal variations can be detected and analyzed. They are ideal for use with the sensors used in ultrasound and photo-acoustic systems while the high speed, wide bandwidth digitizers are available to capture the fast pulses (down to the nano and sub-nanosecond ranges) often found in nuclear medicine.

The digitizers are also equipped with ultra-fast trigger circuits, complete with trigger time stamping, so that the dead-time between acquisitions can be extremely small (down to as little as 16 ns). Together with large on-board memories (up to 4 GSamples/card) and advanced streaming and readout modes this makes the digitizers suited to applications where long and complex signals need to be captured and analyzed. Data can be stored in the on-board memory or streamed in FIFO mode over the fast PCIe bus of the digitizer to a PC. By streaming data to a RAID based storage array it's even possible to seamlessly store hours of information. To help with data analysis and data reduction Spectrum's M4i series of digitizers also feature on-board FPGA based processing functions that can be perform on-the-fly Averaging and Peak detection routines.

Each digitizer card can have from one to four channels and up to eight cards can be linked together with Spectrum's StarHub system to create instruments with up to 32 fully synchronous channels, making them perfect for applications where multiple sensors and large sensor arrays are deployed.

Spectrum Product Features

  • High Sampling Rates up to 10 GS/s and >1.5 GHz bandwidth
  • 12, 14 and 16 bit Resolution
  • Fast Trigger and Read-Out Rates
  • External Clock and Reference Inputs
  • FPGA based Block Average and Block Statisctics (Peak Detect) Options

Matching Card Families

33xx
Family
A/D family
Sample rate
6.40 GS/s - 10 GS/s
Resolution
12 Bit
44xx
Family
A/D family
Sample rate
130 MS/s - 400 MS/s
Resolution
14 Bit 16 Bit
22xx
Family
A/D family
Sample rate
1.25 GS/s - 5 GS/s
Resolution
8 Bit
66xx
Family
D/A family
Sample rate
625 MS/s - 1.25 GS/s
Resolution
16 Bit

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