Toward Automatic Measurement of Carotid Blood Velocity

The measurement of blood velocity in carotid is an important exam routinely performed in clinical practice. With the help of B-mode imaging, the operator places the Doppler sample volume in the carotid lumen, before switching the scanner to pulsed wave Doppler mode. Currently, only trained operators are able to carry out these operations by using expensive and complex systems. Unfortunately, points of care dislocated in rural areas or in developing countries often miss trained personnel. In this work, an automatic blind procedure for assessing the angle-corrected blood velocity in the carotid artery is proposed. The carotid position is detected through automatic, real-time segmentation of B-mode images, while a Doppler investigation from 2 different directions produces angle-corrected velocity estimation. The procedure was experimented on the ULA-OP research scanner, but it is shown suitable to be integrated in low-cost embedded electronics. Experiments on flow phantoms and volunteers show the efficacy of the method.