Doppler pressure field deduced from the Doppler velocity field in an observation plane in a fluid.

A new method is developed for a nondisturbing and quantitative measurement of the pressure at an arbitrary point in a flowing fluid in three-dimensional (3-D) space. In this method, after measuring the velocity field in the observation plane (scanning plane) using the pulsed Doppler technique, the velocity component orthogonal to the Doppler velocity is deduced, taking the law of conservation of mass (the equation of continuity) into consideration. Then, the pressure, "Doppler pressure," is calculated from the acceleration. It is expected that, when this method is applied to cardiology in clinical medicine, it will be very useful as a clinical diagnostic tool for the practical analysis and estimation of hemodynamics in the blood flow in the heart chambers, because the pressure field can be displayed as a 2-D contour.