Advanced electronic systems for Doppler ultrasound applications

Doppler ultrasound techniques are nowadays widely employed in biomedical and industrial applications due to their non-invasive and non-destructive features. Their application spreads from industrial systems finalized, for example, to the characterization of industrial suspensions, to complex biomedical apparatuses like echographs. In the last decades, ultrasound techniques have been continuously growing in both these fields, proposing novel methods and electronic systems. The experimentation of a novel Doppler method and the development of a new electronic system require several tests, which are typically carried out by ultrasound Doppler phantoms and flow-rigs. These consist in hydraulic systems where a pump pushes a scattering fluid through a structure that mimics a morphological tissue or an industrial part. Although modern phantoms have high quality and performances, they are still affected by several problems. For instance, the choice and the preparation of the materials for the phantom realization is not trivial; the mimicked vessel wall can introduce distortion on the ultrasound beam and affect the flow dynamics; the scattering fluid preparation is not easy and requires a long time. However, the most significant flaw is probably the lack of an accurate ground-truth for the velocity distribution of the flow present in the phantom, which limits the evaluation of the accuracy of the method/system under tests in velocity measurements. This PhD work was dedicated to the realization of an accurate testing system for the evaluation of Doppler methods and electronics in both industrial and biomedical fields.