Ultrafast Coherence-Based Power Doppler Estimation Using Nonlinear Compounding With Complementary Subset Transmit

Conventional coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC) and sum-of-square power Doppler (PD) estimation lead to low contrast and high noise level in ultrafast PD imaging when the number of plane-wave angle and the ensemble length is limited. The coherence-based PD estimation using temporal-multiply-and-sum (TMAS) of high-lag autocorrelation can effectively suppress the uncorrelated noises but at the cost of signal power due to the blood flow decorrelation.

In this study, the TMAS PD estimation is incorporated with complementary subset transmit in nonlinear compounding (DMAS-CST) to leverage the signal coherence in both angular and temporal dimensions for improvement of PD image quality. The CST correlation can be performed not only within the same Doppler ensemble (i.e., intra-correlation) but also across the adjacent Doppler ensembles (i.e., inter-correlation) to increase the number of correlation pairs in TMAS PD estimation.

In both simulations and experiments, DMAS-CST is capable of improving the contrast of TMAS PD image by over 10 dB compared to the nonlinear compounding alone by enhanced noise suppression and lower flow decorrelation. When the CST correlations are performed both intra and inter Doppler ensembles, the noise level further reduces in DMAS-CST.

Since the TMAS PD estimation is often limited by the loss of signal power due to temporal decorrelation, the design of complementary subsets in DMAS-CST should be carefully examined to preserve the blood flow signal. Future work of this study will focus on how to combine the conventional PD and the TMAS PD for better signal preservation and effective noise suppression.