Precise measurement of blood flow is of vital importance for studying formation of thrombus and atherosclerotic plaque. However, conventional color Doppler methods are limited to obtain velocity component along the ultrasound beam and have poor accuracy. Several Doppler flow imaging methods based on plane wave emission can estimate the blood velocity vectors and visualize hemodynamic parameters, which provide more detailed blood flow information and effectively improve the ability of clinical diagnosis treatment. Considering the low accuracy of the Doppler flow methods for measuring velocity in complex flow fields, an optimization technique was applied to improve the imaging quality and the accuracy of velocity estimation. This study proposed a modified vector Doppler method, combining multi-angle compound technique, to reconstruct blood velocity vectors of carotid bifurcations obtained from 3D printing. Since the multi-angle compound technology can effectively improve the quality of imaging, this technology was used in Doppler imaging to achieve high-accuracy velocity estimation. It can significantly decrease the velocity estimation errors. Comparing the velocity estimation accuracy of different angle compound numbers (n=1, 3, 5, and 7) in the simulation, it is found that the accuracy of velocity estimation increases with angle compound increasing. Beside, 5-angle compound method is more robust for velocity estimation and can obtain higher frames. The experiments were carried out using a programmable ultrasonic array system and a high-frequency linear array transducer L12-5c with a central frequency of 8.125MHz. The sample rate was set at 31.25MHz. The imaging results of carotid bifurcation also shows that the vector Doppler based on 5-angle compound can obtain a clear image of intravascular vector flow, which is beneficial to identify complex flow state and realize intravascular dynamic imaging. Especially, it can capture the vortex phenomenon in the blood stream. The quantitative results indicated that this method significantly reduces the error between the flow calculation results and the reference results, making the estimation results more accurate. In conclusion, the vector Doppler method based on multi-angle compound has good performance of visualizing complex blood flow and quantifying hemodynamic parameter changes. It also provides reference for the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease and the research of flow imaging methods.
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