A programmable ultrasound platform for multi-gate Doppler measurement

Noninvasive visualization of blood flow with high frequency Doppler ultrasound has been extensively used to assess the morphology and hemodynamics of the microcirculation. A completely digital implementation of multi-gate pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler method was proposed in this paper for high frequency ultrasound applications. Analog mixer was eliminated by a digital demodulator and same data acquisition path was shared with traditional B-mode imaging which made the design compact and flexible. Hilbert transform based quadrature demodulation scheme was employed to achieve the multi-gate Doppler acquisition. Parabolic velocity gradient inside the vessel phantom and velocity profile with different time slots were acquired to demonstrate the functionality of the multi-gate Doppler.