Measurement of Flow Velocity in the Carotid Bifurcation Models Using Multi-Angle Compound Cross-Beam Vector Doppler

Precise measurement of blood flow is of vital importance for studying cardiovascular disease. Current color Doppler methods can only obtain velocity component along the ultrasound beam and have poor accuracy. This study employs a novel vector Doppler based on the multi-angle compounding strategy to reconstruct the 2D flow field of complex models obtained from the computational fluid dynamics (CFD). By comparing the velocity estimation accuracy of different angle compounding numbers (n=1, 3, 5, and 7), it is found that 5 angles compounding is more robust for velocity estimation. In addition, this method has the ability to estimate the velocity vector of the complex flow field, even the vortex, in the carotid bifurcations. The simulation results show that vector Doppler using 5 angles compounding has the potential of visualizing complex blood flow and quantifying the variation of hemodynamic parameters.