Reliable Data Transmission Solutios for Medical Devices

The medical equipment industry belongs to the high-tech industry, involving many fields such as medicine, machinery, electronics, plastics, etc. The production process of this industry is relatively complex, and the entry threshold is high, which is an important symbol of the country's manufacturing industry and the level of high-tech sophistication.

Medical devices and CAN bus?

CAN bus is a bus standard widely used in industrial automation, ships, automobile production, and other fields. In medical equipment, the advantages of the CAN bus are fully utilized due to its high data transmission requirements and strict system security requirements.

It can effectively improve communication efficiency and stability between devices while ensuring the accuracy and reliability of data transmission. At the same time, CAN bus can also adapt to the complex and changing working environment of medical equipment and has the strong anti-interference ability and noise suppression ability, which can ensure the stable operation of medical equipment.

Therefore, the CAN bus has become an important communication standard in modern medical devices and is widely used in various medical devices, such as medical imaging devices, ventilators, hemodialysis machines, etc.

Characteristics of Medical Devices

The system structure of a general medical device is relatively simple, consisting of a master control system (usually a special PC) connected to several information acquisitions, imaging, power management, or control devices.

In different application scenarios, the master control system can acquire data and send commands from the devices in the bus network periodically or non-periodically and finally generate various reports, reports, and conclusions based on the collected data.

Other devices collect data or images of the measurement objects and continuously transmit and interact with information via the CAN bus network.

The main control system is the core brain of the medical device and is used to send and receive collected data quickly. Therefore a highly reliable CAN interface is of great importance.

The Ixxat CAN-IB200/PCIe active PCI Express board (later called CAN-IB200) can be perfectly integrated into the master control system, and the whole series supports a wide range of mainstream PC interfaces, such as PCI, PCIe, etc.

In addition, with the Ixxat CANopen interface API, it is easy to implement the CANopen protocol for inter-device communication on the board.

The boards also support external expansion boards up to 4x CAN channels, which further increases the reliability and scalability of the system.

Real Case

The mobile digital subtraction angiography device (later referred to as DSA) has an integrated CAN-IB200, which enables an external communication interface.

As a general operating device used in and out of the operating room, the DSA has powerful data collection and display, multi-planar reconstruction of stereoscopic imaging, data analysis, and dynamic imaging functions. To realize multiple devices communicating with the main control system simultaneously, the DSA uses the CANopen protocol for internal communication between the main control system and the devices and requires at least four CAN channels to meet the demand.

The customer connected each device to a separate CAN channel to improve stability. Each independent CAN channel needs to be controlled at the same time and be able to communicate with the device with CANOpen to achieve long-term stable device support.

The customer chose the combination of Ixxat CAN-IB200 + expansion board to integrate 4 CAN channels into the main control system and use CANopen protocol to transfer data between the main control system and the devices to provide stable data acquisition and transmission.