Autocorrelation of integrated power Doppler signals and its application

The integrated power Doppler signal arising from blood flow is a random process. In this article, a general approach to model this random process is studied. Both the theoretical and experimental results show that the temporal autocorrelation function of the integrated power Doppler signals is directly related to properties of the insonified medium, such as the scattering strengths and velocities of all moving scatterers, and as well as the properties of the Doppler imaging system, such as the point spread function (psf) of the power Doppler images. Some initial experiments are performed to test the proposed model. Its potential application for flow measurement, such as perfusion evaluation, is also discussed.