3D Flow Reconstruction and Wall Shear Stress Evaluation with 2D Ultrafast Ultrasound Particle Imaging Velocimetry

3D blood flow quantification is valuable for atherosclerosis study but challenging and currently there is a lack of clinical tool for this purpose. This study presents a new divergence free interpolation algorithm, which uses the prior knowledge of incompressible flow, to reconstruct 3D flow from 2D scattered velocity vectors acquired from ultrasound particle imaging velocimetry (UIV, also known as e-PIV). Compounding plane wave imaging and a pulse inversion pulsing scheme are used where microbubbles are used as contrast agents. The 2D ultrasound probe is translated by an automated stage to sparsely scan the whole flow domain with two angles to acquire independent flow information, and then speckel tracking is conducted for 2D velocimetry. Then 2D velocity vectors are input to the algorithm for full field 3D flow reconstruction of steady flow in a bifurcation phantom. The reconstructed flow and wall shear stress show reasonable results and demonstrate the potential in vivo application of the algorithm.