Fusion of Ultrasound Blood Flow and Color Flow Imaging

Conventional ultrasound color flow imaging (CFI) uses the auto-correlation technique to estimate the velocity component along the beam direction. A new method called Blood flow image (BFI) provided qualitative information of the blood flow distribution and movement in any direction of the image. We now propose methods to combine the information from these two ultrasound techniques, CFI and BFI, in vascular imaging. Based on Lasse's algorithm, we have made the following improvements: using optimized regression filters as the wall filtering to improve the computational efficiency and performance in CFI and also increase the frame rate in BFI; taking more flexible dynamic compression strategies to get better visualization in BFI; and new methods in color coding to present the fusion of CFI and BFI. The in vivo test imaging shows that our method achieves good visualization of blood flow both in qualitative and quantitative.