Vascular velocity reconstruction using Color Doppler flow field velocity

Understanding the complex hemodynamics within the vasculature resulting from blood flow patterns is of great importance and has been used clinically and in research applications. Color Doppler imaging (CDI) has been used to assess these hemodynamic patterns by producing 2D velocity fields of the flow within the blood vessels. However, CDI measures only one velocity component and in order to resolve the flow patterns, a flow field reconstruction is needed. Current methods to reconstruct velocity components from CDI have high errors, due to irrotational flow assumptions, oversimplification of the wall and bulk fluid motion effects on local velocity estimates, or non-realistic and invalid boundary conditions. Besides, Doppler velocity reconstruction method known as DoVeR, which uses the relation between stream function and vorticity of the flow to increase the robustness of velocity vector field reconstruction, has been introduced for LV flow reconstruction and fails to work for vascular flows. Therefore, an improved DoVeR method is introduced here to reconstruct velocity fields from Color Doppler images in the vasculature. In this work, synthetic data is used to validate the algorithm. Moreover, steady and pulsatile flow conditions with various Reynolds numbers are used to assess DoVeR reliability in reconstructing velocity vectors experimentally, and the DoVeR reconstructed velocity vectors were compared with Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) data in a round tube mimicking the vasculature. Error analysis (EA) will be reported for the DoVeR method, and we will compare the results of the EA with other methods to determine robustness and reliability for accurately measuring hemodynamic parameters in the vasculature.