Transverse correlation: An efficient transverse flow estimator - initial results

Color flow mapping has become an important clinical tool, for diagnosing a wide range of vascular diseases. Only the velocity component along the ultrasonic beam is estimated, so to find the actual blood velocity, the beam to flow angle has to be known. Because of the unpredictable nature of vascular hemodynamics, the flow angle cannot easily be found as the angle is temporally and spatially variant.

Additionally the precision of traditional methods is severely lowered for high flow angles, and they breakdown for a purely transverse flow. To overcome these problems we propose a new method for estimating the transverse velocity component. The method measures the transverse velocity component by estimating the transit time of the blood between two parallel lines beamformed in receive.

The method has been investigated using simulations performed with Field II. Using 15 emissions per estimate, a standard deviation of 1.64% and a bias of 1.13% are obtained for a beam to flow angle of 90 degrees. Using the same setup a standard deviation of 2.21% and a bias of 1.07% are obtained for a beam to flow angle of 75 degrees.

Using 20 emissions a standard deviation of 3.4% and a bias of 2.06% are obtained at 45 degrees. The method performs stable down to a signal-to-noise ratio of 0 dB, where a standard deviation of 5.5% and a bias of 1.2% is achieved.