Ultrasound Ultrafast Power Doppler Imaging with High Signal-to-Noise Ratio by Temporal Multiply-and-Sum (TMAS) Autocorrelation

Coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC) reconstructs transmit focusing by coherently summing several low-resolution plane-wave (PW) images from different transmit angles to improve its image resolution and quality. The high frame rate of CPWC imaging enables a much larger number of Doppler ensembles such that the Doppler estimation of blood flow becomes more reliable. Due to the unfocused PW transmission, however, one major limitation of the Doppler estimation in CPWC imaging is the relatively low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Conventionally, the Doppler power is estimated by a zero-lag autocorrelation which reduces the noise variance, but not the noise level. A higher-lag autocorrelation method such as the first-lag (R(1)) power Doppler image has been developed to take advantage of the signal coherence in the temporal direction for suppressing uncorrelated random noises. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Multiply-and-Sum (TMAS) power Doppler detection method to further improve the noise suppression of the higher-lag method by modulating the signal coherence among the temporal correlation pairs in the higher-lag autocorrelation with a tunable pt value. Unlike the adaptive beamforming methods which demand for either receive–channel–domain or transmit–domain processing to exploit the spatial coherence of the blood flow signal, the proposed TMAS power Doppler can share the routine beamforming architecture with CPWC imaging. The simulated results show that when it is compared to the original R(1) counterpart, the TMAS power Doppler image with the pt value of 2.5 significantly improves the SNR by 8 dB for the cross-view flow velocity within the Nyquist rate. The TMAS power Doppler, however, suffers from the signal decorrelation of the blood flow, and thus, it relies on not only the pt value and the flow velocity, but also the flow direction relative to the geometry of acoustic beam. The experimental results in the flow phantom and in vivo dataset also agree with the simulations.