Quantitative Doppler measures in coiled vessels: investigation on excised umbilical veins

Quantitative assessment of umbilical venous blood velocity with Doppler ultrasound (US) must cope with the coiled structure of the vein inside the cord. Both an experimental and a theoretical approach showed remarkable variations in the insonation angle when the probe was moved along the vein, provided the inclination between the Doppler probe and the cord was kept constant. Inaccurate signal processing, stochastic variability and flow disturbances could, however, mask the influence of the geometry. The above hypotheses were assessed by investigating five cords in vitro a few hours after delivery from normal pregnancies at term. The Doppler signal was sampled at different sites along each cord and the mean Doppler shift estimated by FFT spectral analysis, both directly and through the noise rejection D'Alessio's algorithm, which proved effective in improving the Doppler shift estimate in condition of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).