A method to detect tortuosity of vessel using non imaging ultrasound approach in carotid structure

Stroke is a leading cause of functional impairments. The typical screening mechanism is to measure localized Peak Systolic Velocity (PSV) and diagnose impending risk associated with stoke by characterizing the PSV values. However, an accurate measurement of PSV using Doppler ultrasound is affected due to the tortuous nature of carotid artery in elder population group as the angle at which acoustic beam strikes the vessel is over or under estimated resulting in improper measure the blood flow velocity. Hence, the proposed approach estimates the degree of tortuosity of the carotid vessel and includes this as calibration parameter to compute an accurate PSV. The proposed system consists of low cost custom-built ultrasound probe and algorithms for computation of tortuosity and calibration of PSV. The method is proposed on a phantom as well as data acquired on the human subjects using non-imaging probe. The results obtained are compared with the ultrasound imaging systems and it is observed to have an error tolerance of ± 2 SD units from ground truth. The proposed approach can be used as point of care non imaging device to screen at risk stroke patients more accurately.