Assessment of a potentially noninvasive method for monitoring aortic blood flow in children.

Ultrasonic methods have rendered possible noninvasive quantitative blood flow measurement. In this work, a method is proposed to measure aortic blood flow in children by means of a specially designed miniaturized esophageal probe and an autonomous apparatus combining an M-mode imaging system and a pulsed Doppler. In vivo experimental results in animals are presented and demonstrate the interest of simultaneous and continuous measurement of aortic diameter and blood flow velocity giving accurate measurements. A 0.94 correlation coefficient is found when comparing blood flow in the descending aorta measured using this method and using an electromagnetic flowmeter.