P6B-12 Blood Velocity Estimation Based On 3D Spatiotemporal Filtering of Sequences of Ultrasound Images

Blood velocity estimation is required in many clinical applications. Ultrasonic imaging is often used to reach this goal. This article presents a new blood velocity estimation method from ultrasonic imaging It claims to be complementary to Doppler imaging which presents some limitations. New techniques like speckle tracking or decorrelation-based methods have already been developed to overcome these limitations. Our method is based on spatiotemporai filtering to estimate the apparent velocity vector for each pixel of the sequence of B-mode imaging. A moving object, which can be a region of speckle, leaves a trace in the spatiotemporai volume. A bank of filters is designed in order to estimate a local texture orientation related to the velocity of the object. The method was applied to ultrasonic sequences of images of calibrated flow in a vessel (mean velocity < 1 mm/s). The velocity estimates are exhibited a mean error < 5%). They are presented as a dense field of velocity vectors, an associated velocities profile and a dynamic cartography.