Pre-clinical investigations of multi-path propagation in transcranial Doppler ultrasound flow phantom

Abstract

There are various practical situations in medical applications when pre-clinical investigations must be performed using a simulation environment or test bench prior to human studies. One example is the analysis of propagation channels in Transcanial Doppler (TCD) ultrasound (US), a signal processing challenge requiring the analysis of data from US waves scattered in three dimensions (3D). When examining the effects of scatterers in such channels, it is common to use a data acquisition test bench and a Doppler flow phantom. Such medical phantoms are frequently required to verify image and signal processing systems, and are often used to support algorithm development for a wide range of imaging and blood flow assessments. In this paper we describe a TCD simulation environment for the acquisition, investigation and pre-clinical data analysis of multi-path propagation in TCD US systems. This is demonstrated by comparing the anticipated theoretical and simulation channel statistics with the measured acoustic characteristics in terms of the probability distribution and autocorrelation functions.