Experimental evaluation of velocity and power estimation for ultrasound blood flow imaging, by means of a two-dimensional autocorrelation approach

This paper evaluates experimentally the performance of a novel axial velocity estimator, the 2D autocorrelator, and its Doppler power estimation counterpart, the 2D zero-lag autocorrelator, in the context of ultrasound color flow mapping. The evaluation also encompasses the well-established 1D autoc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control ferroelectrics, and frequency control, 1995-07, Vol.42 (4), p.689-699
Main Authors: Loupas, T., Peterson, R.B., Gill, R.W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Autocorrelation
Biological and medical sciences
Blood flow
Cardiovascular system
Color
Fluctuations
Frequency estimation
Investigative techniques, diagnostic techniques (general aspects)
Laboratories
Medical sciences
Radio frequency
Signal processing algorithms
Two dimensional displays
Ultrasonic imaging
Ultrasonic investigative techniques
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Summary:This paper evaluates experimentally the performance of a novel axial velocity estimator, the 2D autocorrelator, and its Doppler power estimation counterpart, the 2D zero-lag autocorrelator, in the context of ultrasound color flow mapping. The evaluation also encompasses the well-established 1D autocorrelation technique for velocity estimation and its corresponding power estimator (1D zero-lag autocorrelator), to allow performance comparisons under identical conditions. Clutter-suppressed in vitro data sets from a steady-flow system are used to document the effect of the range gate and ensemble length, noise level and angle of insonation on the precision of the velocity estimates. The same data sets are used to examine issues related to the estimation of the Doppler signal's power. The first-order statistics of power estimates from regions corresponding to flow and noise are determined experimentally and the ability of power-based thresholding to separate flow signals from noise is characterized by means of ROC analysis. In summary, the results of the in vitro evaluation show that the proposed 2D-autocorrelation form of processing is consistently better than the corresponding 1D-autocorrelation techniques, in terms of both velocity and power estimation. Therefore, given their relatively modest implementation requirements, the 2D-autocorrelation algorithms for velocity and power estimation appear to represent a superior, yet realistic, alternative to conventional Doppler processing for color flow mapping.< >
ISSN:0885-3010
1525-8955
DOI:10.1109/58.393111