Udayan Dasgupta
Texas Instruments

DSP chips are gaining importance in ultrasound applications as the need for portability and low power grows. One of the more computationally demanding applications for ultrasound involves estimating blood flow characteristics using Doppler techniques. The color Doppler ultrasound mode is used to diagnose many conditions like blood clots, valve defects, and blocked arteries. This application report looks at mapping typical color Doppler algorithms onto Texas Instruments' high performance C64x+ core. The algorithms include RF demodulation, wall filtering and flow power, velocity, and turbulence estimation. This document starts with a general technique for analyzing algorithm complexity on the C64x+ architecture, then applies this technique to Doppler processing algorithms, explains their mapping to the C64x architecture, and finally compares these estimates to actual implementations. Based on these implementations, it will be shown that these algorithms can run on TI's C64x-based DSPs using a fraction of the available processing power.