Implementation of color-flow plane-wave imaging in real-time

The Transmission of Plane Waves (PWT) has recently promoted the development of “ultrafast” Doppler applications. The inherent high computation cost has typically enabled retrospective implementations, i.e. the acquisition of raw data followed by fast off-line beamforming and Doppler processing. In this paper, the combination of PWT with real-time beamforming and Color Flow Mapping (CFM) is experimentally evaluated in comparison with a conventional focussed transmission (FT). The ULA-OP 256 research scanner was configured to implement CFM together with either PWT or FT, and tested on a pulsatile flow phantom. The total computational cost was measured under different conditions allowing frame rates up to 800 Hz for a CFM region of 256×64 points and ensemble length = 8.