Estimating the blood velocity vector using aperture domain data

Most conventional blood flow estimation methods measure only the axial component of the blood velocity vector. In this study, we developed a new method for two-dimensional (2-D) velocity vector estimation in which time shifts resulting from blood motion are calculated for the individual channels using aperture domain data. This allows the construction of a time-shift profile along the array direction as a function of channel index, which is approximated by a first-order polynomial whose zeroth-order and first-order terms can be used to determine the axial and lateral velocity components, respectively. The efficacy of the proposed method was verified by simulations and experiments in which the transducer array had 64 elements, an aperture size of 1.96 cm, and a center frequency of 5 MHz. The flow velocity ranged from 5 to 35 cm/s and the Doppler angle ranged from 0deg to 90deg. The experimental results show that the accuracy of axial velocity estimation is higher for the new method than for the autocorrelation-based conventional method when the signal-to-noise ratio is larger than 0 dB. The mean estimation error for the axial velocity component is 2.18% for the new method, compared to 4.51% for the conventional method. The mean estimation error for the lateral velocity component is 15%, which is comparable to existing methods.