A New Algorithm for Blood Flow Measurement Based on the Doppler Flow Spectrogram

The blood flow is traditionally obtained by multiplying the cross sectional area of the blood vessel and the average blood speed in the cross section, or is given by the integral of the product of the cross section and blood velocity of each element. However, both methods are affected greatly by the measurement precision of the area and velocity. A new algorithm, which is based on the Doppler blood flow spectrogram, is proposed to measure the blood flow in this paper. In the algorithm, the blood flow is calculated according to the double integral of a Doppler blood flow spectrogram. To verify the feasibility of the proposed algorithm, experiments have been performed on the Doppler blood-mimicking system <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$KS205D-1$ </tex-math></inline-formula> using the SonixTouch ultrasonic system. In addition, linear-regression analysis is carried out to observe the correlation factors between the experimental values and real values of different flow rates. Experimental results show that the calculated values and real values correlate significantly <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(r>0.969, P < 0.0000001)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Experimental results both on males and females also verified the proposed algorithm <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(r>0.915, P < 0.00053)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Hence the proposed algorithm is proven effective for relative mean blood flow measurement. Due to the special structure of the human brain, it is difficult to measure the cross sectional area of blood vessel with ultrasound imaging. In this algorithm, there is no need to measure the cross sectional area of the blood vessel. Therefore, the proposed algorithm has the potential to be a new method for clinical ultrasonic blood flow measurement, especially cerebral blood flow measurement.

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