A simple measure of flow disorder and wall shear stress in phase contrast MRI.

A method for estimating the standard deviation of velocity within a voxel is proposed. This estimate is based on data collected using a phase-contrast MRI technique. Simulations are presented to characterize the estimate and in vivo data are shown. Several different uses of the estimate are proposed, including obtaining a measure of wall shear stress, aiding in data combination from different phase-contrast MRI datasets, and mitigation of flow void artifacts. Copyright 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.