Visualizing tumour perfusion with plane-wave contrast-enhanced Doppler: Concepts and trade-offs

While long Doppler acquisitions are, in principle, beneficial for accurate velocity estimates, short acoustic pulses must be used in microbubble contrast-enhanced Doppler to mitigate microbubble destruction. This introduces new trade-offs in velocity estimates, which are studied here. In this work, we develop a model predicting the variance of microbubble flow estimated with 1D autocorrelators and demonstrate experimentally the impact of microbubble nonlinear behaviour on the measured velocity. A case study of perfusion in a VX-2 carcinoma using contrast-enhanced plane-wave Doppler is also shown.