Various approaches for detecting microbubble cavitation resulting from ultrasound waves transmitted from an ultrasound transducer include associating at least one time-domain reference signal with microbubble cavitation； causing the transducer to transmit one or more ultrasound pulse； acquiring, in the time domain, an echo signal from microbubbles in response to the transmitted ultrasound pulse(s)； correlating at least a portion of the echo signal to at least a corresponding portion of the time-domain reference signal based on similarity therebetween； and detecting the microbubble cavitation based on the corresponding portion of the reference signal.
