Potentials of volumetric blood-flow measurement

Current intravascular ultrasound techniques produce real-time imaging of a vessel cross-section with a scan plane normal to blood flow. When randomly distributed blood particles travel through this ultrasound imaging plane, the received echo signals decorrelate as a function of time. The speed of such a decorrelation procedure is proportional to the flow velocity. This phenomenon provides a potential to estimate blood velocities by means of decorrelation analysis. In this paper, we present a method for measuring local blood velocity and quantifying volume flow directly from cross-sectional intravascular ultrasound data. This method is based on multiple decorrelation assessments with a sequence of radio frequency echo signals. The velocity measurement is obtained by comparing the measured decorrelation value with the prior knowledge of the beam characteristics of an intravascular ultrasound transducer. Volume flow is derived by integrating the cross-sectional area and its corresponding velocity vector over the vessel lumen. The decorrelation-based method was tested in vitro with a flow phantom. Measurements were also carried out in vivo in pig experiments to determine the usefulness of this method in clinical settings. Preliminary results of these experiments indicate that the proposed decorrelation method is able to extract cross-sectional velocity profiles and volumetric flow both in vitro and in vivo.