System for Ultrasound Color Doppler Imaging

Abstract

Systems for color Doppler imaging in an ultrasound imaging system are disclosed herein. An ultrasound imaging system includes color Doppler imaging circuitry. The color Doppler imaging circuitry is configured to estimate flow parameters. The imaging circuitry includes a radio frequency (“RF”) demodulator configured to produce in-phase and quadrature components of an ultra-sound data vector. The RF demodulator includes a table in memory that stores interleaved sine and cosine values. The RF demodulator maintains an index value for the table having higher precision than is used to index the table. The RF demodulator rounds the index value for each access of the table. Each table access retrieves a sine value and a cosine value.

1 - 15 . (canceled) 
     
     
         16 . An ultrasound color Doppler imaging system, comprising:
 a processor; and   a non-transitory software system for color Doppler imaging executed by the processor, the non-transitory software system comprising:
 a plurality of nested processing loops including an inner loop and an outer loop; 
 a transpose Wall filter coefficient matrix stored in memory, and the non-transitory software system causes the processor to fetch a plurality of Wall filter coefficients in a single access; 
 wherein the non-transitory software system comprises instructions that when executed cause the processor to convert real radio frequency (“RF”) ultrasound samples to complex RF ultrasound samples using sine and cosine values stored in adjacent memory locations. 
   
     
     
         17 . The system of  claim 16 , wherein the processor is a very long instruction word (“VLIW”) processor. 
     
     
         18 . The system of  claim 17 , wherein the VLIW processor comprises a plurality of parallel data execution paths, each execution path comprising a plurality of execution units, each instruction of the software system being mapped to an execution unit. 
     
     
         19 . The system of  claim 16 , wherein the software system comprises instructions that when executed cause the processor to decimate the complex RF ultrasound samples. 
     
     
         20 . The system of  claim 19 , wherein the software system comprises instructions that when executed cause the processor to compute flow parameters from the decimated complex ultrasound samples, the computed flow parameters comprising at least one of flow power, flow turbulence, and flow velocity. 
     
     
         21 . The system of  claim 19 , wherein the software system comprises instructions that when executed cause the processor to filter vessel wall motion from the decimated complex ultrasound samples. 
     
     
         22 . (canceled) 
     
     
         23 . The system of  claim 16 , wherein both the outer loop and the inner loop of at least one of the plurality of nested processing loops are unrolled. 
     
     
         24 .- 26 . (canceled)