GRCon20 - Time Delay Spectrometry Ultrasound with GNU Radio Capturing and Teaching the Principles

Presented by Paul Otto at GNU Radio Conference 2020 https://gnuradio.org/grcon20 GNU Radio Companion, combined with Jupyter notebooks, provides an ideal interactive framework for teaching the principles of time delay spectrometry (TDS) - a low-cost way of implementing many ultrasound applications, such as nondestructive testing and diagnostic medicine. TDS is a specific ultrasound modality that transmits sound energy as long chirps instead of short pulses. TDS has many advantages over pulsed ultrasound, such as its low cost and low power. GNU Radio Companion provides an interactive environment for illustrating TDS signal processing techniques with logical block diagrams. It lends itself well to online instruction because the student can experiment at home with low-cost components, such as $20 software-defined radios. This presentation focuses on the development of an online, open-source TDS course curriculum using GNU Radio for hands-on experiments. I will demonstrate a sampling of TDS techniques, along with an evaluation of their performance, and will discuss options for an interactive teaching framework. Paul Otto completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering from George Mason University in 2019. He currently works as a research assistant in the lab of Siddhartha Sikdar developing compact low-power hardware for sonomyography. He is passionate about unconventional uses for software defined radios and how those uses can be used to help others solve problems in their field of interest.