In vivo transthoracic ultrafast Doppler imaging of left intraventricular blood flow pattern

Abstract

Mechanistic heart diseases can affect intraventricular blood flow pattern. Standard ultrasound Doppler techniques only describe blood flow patterns in the ejection and the diastasis phase. In this work, we use ultrafast circular wave imaging to map in 2D the blood flow patterns in the left ventricle during the whole cardiac cycle without any use of contrast agent. The high spatio temporal sampling permits to rely on much more effective wall filtering and increase sensitivity to map blood flow patterns in the pre-ejection, ejection, early diastole, diastasis and late diastole phase. The study of these patterns with high sensitivity and high temporal resolution could provide more accuracy in the diagnosis.