Live high-frame-rate echocardiography

We describe an advanced real-time high-speed echocardiographic system with live display while scanning. Images are acquired at rates up to 1000 per second for adult cardiac applications and are stored in computer memory. Images may be played back in slow motion or frame by frame to analyze cardiac motion at the millisecond time scale. Images are acquired using the T5 Duke University Phased Array Scanner that allows 32:1 hardware parallel processing in receive and uses a defocused transmit beam. Clinical scans of 70 patients at rates of 240 to 1000 fps showed adequate image quality for diagnostic purpose. We anticipate that high temporal resolution cardiac images will enable the realization of more accurate and new quantitative descriptors of cardiac function in disease and health.