Color Doppler Echocardiography Velocity Reconstruction using Data Fusion with 4D Flow MRI

Color Flow Imaging (CFI), an imaging modality that measures intracardiac blood velocity, is useful for detecting ailments including congenital birth defects and valvular diseases. One limitation of the velocity measurements with CFI is that it only provides a single component of the underlying velocity vector field on the imaging plane. Recently introduced reconstruction methods such as Vector Flow Mapping (VFM) and Doppler Vector Reconstruction (DoVeR) can estimate the underlying vector field, however, both methods have inherent limitations. We introduce an improved Doppler-Velocity-Reconstruction (i-DoVeR) method, which uses data fusion of CFI and 4D flow MRI to reconstruct the volumetric field of the underlying velocity vectors. This library-based sparse representation method yields more physically consistent and hemodynamically accurate measurements to state-of-the-art reconstruction methods. We demonstrate the method with 9 healthy volunteers who underwent 4D flow MRI and CFI for resolving flow in the right ventricle. We compare our new method against the conventional intraventricular vector flow mapping (iVFM), DoVeR and 4D flow MRI data, and report on its accuracy and robustness.