Advances in Pulsed Doppler Methods for Peripheral Perfusion Imaging

We report on methods for imaging blood perfusion in peripheral skeletal muscle tissues without exogenous contrast enhancement. The ultimate goal is to provide new tools for monitoring the development and treatment of peripheral artery disease (PAD) in diabetic patients. Sparse ultrasonic pulse-echo acquisitions are arranged into 3-D echo data arrays. Each array is decomposed using higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) methods to uncouple echo sources for clutter filtering before signal power is mapped into power Doppler (PD) images. This method enables further segmentation of the blood-echo power into flow maps covering non-overlapping velocity ranges. Our method is compared with other imaging modalities that together assess the recovery in a murine hindlimb ischemia model of PAD.