Blood flow imaging and volume flow quantitation with intravascular ultrasound.

Current intravascular ultrasound techniques produce real-time imaging of a vessel cross-section with a scan plane approximately normal to blood flow. When a cluster of randomly distributed blood particles moves across the ultrasound beam, the received echo signals decorrelate as a function of time. This phenomenon may be used to estimate blood velocities by measuring the decorrelation rate from a sequence of blood scattering signals. A decorrelation-based method for measuring local blood velocity and quantifying volume flow from cross-sectional radio frequency intravascular echo signals was developed. Serial in vitro measurements were performed with a flow phantom to test the principle of the proposed velocity estimation method. An in vivo pig experiment was carried out to study the feasibility of applying this method in clinical settings. Preliminary results of this study indicate that the proposed decorrelation method is able to extract cross-sectional velocity data and volumetric flow both in vitro and in vivo.