Investigation of Real-Time Capabilities of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 for a Fourier-Based Imaging Algorithm
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Point-of-Care Ultrasound (PoCUS) devices have the potential to enable safe, fast and cost-efficient medical imaging, which can democratize access to medical diagnostics. However, achieving high image quality and real-time performance despite the significant resource constraints of mobile devices is essential for clinical adoption. Fourier-Based Imaging (FBI) is emerging as an alternative to the simple and well established delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming, as it promises improved image quality albeit higher computational effort. This work investigates an efficient implementation of FBI and evaluates the performance on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 system-on-chip (SoC) CPU and GPU using a synthetic radiofrequency (RF) ultrasound dataset. CPU profiling identified the real-to-complex (r2c) Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) as a primary bottleneck, with optimizations reducing runtime from 2993 ms to 892 ms per frame. GPU acceleration via the clFFT library and a custom OpenCL kernel for k-space processing, enhanced through kernel fusion, constant memory usage, and instruction-level tuning, further reduced runtime to 388 ms, a 2.86x speed-up over the optimized CPU version. Although 30 fps real-time performance was not reached under these imaging parameters (2.58 fps), reducing the number of transmitters increased throughput to approximately 6 fps at the expense of image fidelity. These results demonstrate the mobile GPU’s potential for FBI and suggest that real-time execution on next-generation SoCs is within reach.
Details
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 176-180 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | IEEE Open Journal of Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control |
| Volume | 5 |
| Publication status | Published - 23 Sept 2025 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
| ORCID | /0000-0002-3295-0727/work/195438010 |
|---|---|
| ORCID | /0000-0002-0676-6926/work/195442037 |
| ORCID | /0000-0001-5921-9478/work/195442361 |
| ORCID | /0009-0004-9063-5161/work/195442364 |
| unpaywall | 10.1109/ojuffc.2025.3613273 |
| ORCID | /0000-0002-2421-6127/work/198593509 |
| ORCID | /0009-0004-0685-2463/work/198594928 |
Keywords
DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards
Subject groups, research areas, subject areas according to Destatis
Sustainable Development Goals
Keywords
- Kernel, Graphics processing units, Fast Fourier transforms, Runtime, Real-time systems, Libraries, Imaging, Ultrasonic imaging, Radio frequency, Optimization