Abstract

Angle independent ultrasonic flow imaging has been accomplished by tracking speckle patterns produced by moving tissue in ultrasound images. Scientists at Duke University have developed digital hardware to measure local displacement vectors of speckle patterns in sequential digitized 2-D ultrasound images at video rates.¹ Recent experiments demonstrate that Sandia's acousto-optic image correlator can be used to measure these 2-D speckle flow vectors in real time. The accuracy of the acousto-optic system appears to be as good as that of the digital system for the limited data set tested; however, the acousto-optic correlator has much greater potential for ultra-high-speed computation of flow images because of the inherent parallelism of the optical architecture.

© 1992 Optical Society of America