Color-flow US imaging through the analysis of speckle motion

Reflections obtained from moving red blood cells on an ultrasound (US) scan of the abdominal aorta were enhanced with real-time Boolean operations on sequential frames of the image, as well as with frame subtraction and motion-detection processing. The Boolean operations used were the logical AND, OR, and Exclusive OR (XOR). Through the manipulation of output color lookup tables, the pixels within the flow field were given color representations. The resulting color-flow information can then be superimposed over the gray-scale image from the US imager to create color-flow imaging without the use of traditional Doppler US technology.