Toward the Real Time implementation of the 2-D Frequency-Domain Vector Doppler method

Ultrasonography is widely used for tissue imaging and blood flow assessment thanks to its important advantages in terms of performance, cost and safety. High frame rate 2-D vector blood flow imaging is an innovative method that delivers accurate two-dimensional velocity maps but requires time consuming algorithms, which has limited real-time applications so far. In this paper, a GPU based implementation of the technique is proposed and its speed compared to previous implementations addressed to rapidly process 2-D vector data. The results obtained by using optimized code and massive parallel computation devices, confirm that the method is suitable for real-time applications in the near future.