A GPU-Accelerated Pipeline for Real-Time Power Doppler Imaging Using Compound Barker Code Excitation

Power Doppler imaging is an invaluable tool for blood flow assessment. However, its quality can be degraded in scenarios where the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low. To address this, coded excitation schemes have been proposed to use longer transmit pulses without a reduction in axial resolution. One particular method that can generate arbitrarily long pulses is the use of compound Barker codes, which can provide significant improvements in SNR in the context of power Doppler imaging. However, the combination of these methods has yet to be implemented in real time. Therefore, in this work, we leverage the parallel processing of GPUs to exhibit the first real-time demonstration of power Doppler imaging using compound Barker code excitation.