Portable Vector Flow Imaging Compared With Spectral Doppler Ultrasonography

In this study, a vector flow imaging (VFI) method developed for a portable ultrasound scanner was used for estimating peak velocity values and variation in beam-to-flow angle over the cardiac cycle in vivo on healthy volunteers. Peak-systolic velocity (PSV), end-diastolic velocity (EDV), and resistive index (RI) measured with VFI were compared to spectral Doppler ultrasonography (SDU). Seventeen healthy volunteers were scanned on the left and right common carotid arteries (CCAs). The standard deviation (SD) of VFI measurements averaged over the cardiac cycle was 7.3% for the magnitude and 3.84° for the angle. Bland-Altman plots showed a positive bias for the PSV measured with SDU (mean difference: 0.31 ms
^-1
), and Pearson correlation analysis showed a highly significant correlation (r = 0.6; p <; 0.001). A slightly positive bias was found for EDV and RI measured with SDU (mean difference: 0.08 ms
^-1
and -0.01 ms
^-1
, respectively). However, the correlation was low and not significant. The beam-to-flow angle was estimated over the systolic part of the cardiac cycle, and its variations were for all measurements larger than the precision of the angle estimation. The range spanned deviations from -25.2° (-6.0 SD) to 23.7° (4.2 SD) with an average deviation from -15.5° to 9.7°. This can significantly affect PSV values measured by SDU as the beam-to-flow angle is not constant and not aligned with the vessel surface. The study demonstrates that the proposed VFI method can be used in vivo for the measurement of PSV in the CCAs, and that angle variations across the cardiac cycle can lead to significant errors in SDU velocity estimates.