Automated analysis of Doppler ultrasound velocity flow diagrams

A highly automated method for the identification and quantization of maximum blood velocity curves from Doppler ultrasound flow diagrams is presented. The method uses an image processing scheme to analyze video-recorded image sequences of flow diagrams. The sequences are acquired, a sequence of images relating to chronological cardiac cycles is extracted, and a maximum blood velocity envelope is determined and quantified. The results are verified against hand-traced reference curves. Excellent correlation of r = 0.99 is achieved.