Graphics Processing Unit-Based High-Frame-Rate Color Doppler Ultrasound Processing

Color Doppler ultrasound is a routinely used diagnostic tool for assessing blood flow information in real time. The required signal processing is computationally intensive, involving autocorrelation, linear filtering, median filtering, and thresholding. Because of the large amount of data and high computational requirement, color Doppler signal processing has been mainly implemented on custom-designed hardware, with software-based implementation - particularly on a general- purpose CPU - not being successful. In this paper, we describe the use of a graphics processing unit for implementing signal-processing algorithms for color Doppler ultrasound that achieves a frame rate of 160 fps for frames comprising 500 scan lines times 128 range samples, with each scan line being obtained from an ensemble size of 8 with an 8-tap FIR clutter filter.