Doppler vortography: a color Doppler approach to quantification of intraventricular blood flow vortices.

We propose a new approach to quantification of intracardiac vorticity based on conventional color Doppler images -Doppler vortography. Doppler vortography relies on the centrosymmetric properties of the vortices. Such properties induce particular symmetries in the Doppler flow data that can be exploited to describe the vortices quantitatively. For this purpose, a kernel filter was developed to derive a parameter, the blood vortex signature (BVS), that allows detection of the main intracardiac vortices and estimation of their core vorticities. The reliability of Doppler vortography was assessed in mock Doppler fields issued from simulations and in vitro data. Doppler vortography was also tested in patients and compared with vector flow mapping by echocardiography. Strong correlations were obtained between Doppler vortography-derived and ground-truth vorticities (in silico: r2 = 0.98, in vitro: r2 = 0.86, in vivo: r2 = 0.89). Our results indicate that Doppler vortography is a potentially promising echocardiographic tool for quantification of vortex flow in the left ventricle.