On the efficient estimation of blood velocities.

Pulsed wave (PW) Doppler ultrasound systems are commonly used to examine blood flow dynamics and the technique plays a very important role in numerous diagnostic applications. Commonly, narrow-band PW systems estimate the blood velocity using an autocorrelation-based estimator. Herein, we examine a recently proposed hybrid frequency estimator, and via extensive numerical simulations using simulated blood scatterers show the achievable performance gain of this method as compared to the traditional approach.