Estimation of blood velocity vectors using transverse ultrasound beam focusing and cross-correlation

Modern ultrasound scanners estimate the blood velocity by tracking the movement of the blood scatterers along the ultrasound beam. This is done by emitting pulsed ultrasound fields and finding the shift in position from pulse to pulse by correlating the received signals. Only the velocity component along the beam direction is found, and this is a serious limitation in the current scanners, since most blood vessels are parallel to the skin surface. A method to find the velocity across the vessel has been suggested by Bonnefous (1988). Here a number of parallel receive beams are measured and used in a correlation estimator to find the velocity across the beam. This approach is extended in this paper by making beamforming along the direction of the flow. A fairly broad beam is emitted and the received signal is then focused along a selected direction. This direction can be along the ultrasound beam or across it or in any direction to the beam. The focused lines, thus, follow the flow and a cross-correlation of lines from different pulses can find the movement of the blood particles between pulse emissions and, thus, the blood velocity. The new approach is investigated using the Field II simulation program. Simulations are shown for a parabolic velocity profile for flow-to-beam angles of 30, 45, 60, and 90 degrees using a 64 elements linear array with a center frequency of 3 MHz, a pitch of 0.3 mm, and an element height of 5 mm. The peak velocity in the parabolic flow was 0.5 m/s, and the pulse repetition frequency was 3.5 kHz. Using four pulse-echo lines, the parabolic flow profile was found with a standard deviation of 0.028 m/s at 60 degrees and 0.092 m/s at 90 degrees (transverse to the ultrasound beam), corresponding to accuracies of 5.6% and 18.4%. Using ten lines gave standard deviations of 0.021 m/s and 0.089 m/s, respectively, corresponding to accuracies of 4.2% and 17.8%