Perfusion signal processing for optimal detection performance

There is considerable interest in developing high-resolution power-Doppler imaging to assess dynamic scattering that lacks the coherence necessary for color-flow Doppler methods. These methods have applications in evaluating the vascularity of cancerous lesions as well as micro-vasculature associated some auto-immune disorders. The objective of this study is to demonstrate the degree to which incorporating additional statistical properties of the perfusion signal can improve power-Doppler imaging. The analytical contribution of the work is the derivation of an optimal perfusion detector tuned to the correlation structure of the power-Doppler signal. We use this to compare the statistically optimal detector to detection performance of the standard wall-filtered intensity as proof-of-principle for the incorporation of signal statistics into perfusion imaging.