Aliasing-tolerant color Doppler quantification of regurgitant jets

Conservation of momentum transfer in regurgitant cardiac jets can be used to calculate the flow rate from color Doppler velocities. In this study, turbulent jets were simulated by finite elements; pseudocolor Doppler images were interpolated from the computations, with aliasing introduced artificially. Jets were also imaged by color Doppler in an in vitro flow system. To suppress aliasing errors, jet velocities were fitted iteratively to a fluid mechanical model constrained to match the orifice velocity (measured without aliasing by continuous-wave Doppler). At each iteration, the model was used to detect aliased velocities, which were excluded during the next iteration. Iteration continued until the flow rate calculated by the model and number of calculated nonaliased pixels were unchanged. The good correlations between measured and calculated flow rates in the experimental (R2 = 0.933) and computational studies (R2 = 0.990) suggest that this may be a clinically useful approach even in aliased images. Published by Elsevier Science Inc.