Determination of tissue motion velocity by correlation interpolation of pulsed ultrasonic echo signals.

Correlation interpolation is introduced as a method to determine the displacement of moving biological tissue on the basis of a sequence of ultrasonic echo signals. The echo signal is sampled along the echo depth with approximately 4 samples per average high frequency period. Sampling in time occurs with the pulse repetition frequency. The necessary information is extracted from a crosscorrelation function between successive signals, which is modelled using four parameters. The parameters are estimated from five calculated correlation sums and the shift with maximum correlation is determined. In contrast to existing techniques, the performance of this method is determined mainly by the number of samples used, while the ratio of the number of samples in depth and time is irrelevant. Using 64 samples at a signal-to-noise power ratio of 10, the standard deviation of the error in the determination of the shift in depth is 0.08 sampling intervals. As in many other methods, the width of the aliasing interval equals the mean frequency period.