Implementation and evaluation of slow-time golay decoding for pre-clinical high-frequency color doppler imaging in mice

Golay Complementary Sequence (GCS) is conventionally regarded as not applicable to blood flow detection due to potential side-lobe motion artifact in the decoding. In our previous study, it has been shown that GCS decoding can be performed by low-pass filtering in slow-time Doppler domain with cutoff frequency of PRF/4 to alleviate the motion artifact. In this work, the proposed GCS Doppler decoding has been implemented in a pre-clinical high-frequency ultrasound imaging system to study the color Doppler quality and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) using phantom and in-vivo experiments. The phantom results show that, when the Doppler shift is within ±PRF/4, the GCS provides comparable Doppler information to conventional un-coded method while the SNR improves. The in-vivo results also demonstrate that Doppler penetration increases from 13.5 mm to 14.2 mm in the mouse´s kidney. For the abdominal aorta, GCS Doppler also enables the increase of transmit frequency from 30 MHz to 35 MHz to detect blood flow.