A Novel Highly-Efficient Amplification Scheme for Wireless Communications in a CathLab Environment

Wireless communication systems are being considered for medical applications to facilitate the doctors' operation and the quality of the medical procedures. A demonstrative example of this is the catheterization laboratory (CathLab), where it is desirable to replace the existent wired connections by wireless alternatives. However, there are some challenging requirements that need to be fulfilled by the wireless link, especially for intra-vascular ultra-sound (IVUS) systems, since the images acquired by the catheter should be transmitted with very high data rate and low latency, together with the highest possible amplification efficiency, to increase the battery life. The communication requirements can be achieved with latest the Wi-Fi standard IEEE 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6). However, since Wi-Fi is based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms, the transmitted signals present high envelope fluctuations, leading to amplification difficulties due to the nonlinear distortion effects and low energy efficiency. In this paper, we present an innovative amplification scheme named quantized digital amplification (QDA). It is shown that the QDA allows a quasi-linear amplification of IEEE 802.11ax signals while maintaining a very high energy efficiency. To demonstrate this, a QDA prototype and a set of performance results, regarding both the linearity of the transmitted signals and the energy efficiency, are presented.