New medical technologies often hold great promise, but few patients will benefit unless an effective implementation can be brought to market at a reasonable cost. One of the most cost effective ways of developing new solutions is to leverage techniques and equipment developed for other purposes. Medical ultrasound, which borrows heavily from naval sonar, is probably the best known example, but other technology developed for military purposes is also being adapted to medical uses. With the introduction of Abaco Systems ICS-1650, developers of PC-based medical imaging systems now have a native PCI Express slot card that provides high performance signal acquisition capability with leading edge FPGA based DSP resources, at a very reasonable price.