Colour-Doppler echocardiography flow field velocity reconstruction using a streamfunction-vorticity formulation.

Abstract

We introduce a new method (Doppler Velocity Reconstruction or DoVeR), for reconstructing two-component velocity fields from colour Doppler scans. DoVeR employs the streamfunction-vorticity equation, which satisfies mass conservation while accurately approximating the flow rate of rotation. We validated DoVeR using artificial colour Doppler images generated from computational fluid dynamics models of left ventricle (LV) flow. We compare DoVeR against the conventional intraventricular vector flow mapping (iVFM1D) and reformulated iVFM (iVFM2D). LV model error analysis showed that DoVeR is more robust to noise and probe placement, with noise RMS errors (nRMSE) between 3.81% and 6.67%, while the iVFM methods delivered 4.16-24.17% for iVFM1D and 4.06-400.21% for iVFM2D. We test the DoVeR and iVFM methods using in vivo mouse LV ultrasound scans. DoVeR yielded more haemodynamically accurate reconstructions, suggesting that it can provide a more reliable approach for robust quantification of cardiac flow.