Staggered Multiple-PRF Ultrafast Color Doppler

Color Doppler imaging is an established pulsed ultrasound technique to visualize blood flow non-invasively. High-frame-rate (ultrafast) color Doppler, by emissions of plane or circular wavefronts, allows severalfold increase in frame rates. Conventional and ultrafast color Doppler are both limited by the range-velocity dilemma, which may result in velocity folding (aliasing) for large depths and/or large velocities. We investigated multiple pulse-repetition-frequency (PRF) emissions arranged in a series of staggered intervals to remove aliasing in ultrafast color Doppler. Staggered PRF is an emission process where time delays between successive pulse transmissions change in an alternating way. We tested staggered dual- and triple-PRF ultrafast color Doppler, 1) in vitro in a spinning disc and a free jet flow, and 2) in vivo in a human left ventricle. The in vitro results showed that the Nyquist velocity could be extended to up to 6 times the conventional limit. We found coefficients of determination r2 ≥ 0.98 between the de-aliased and ground-truth velocities. Consistent de-aliased Doppler images were also obtained in the human left heart. Our results demonstrate that staggered multiple-PRF ultrafast color Doppler is efficient for high-velocity high-frame-rate blood flow imaging. This is particularly relevant for new developments in ultrasound imaging relying on accurate velocity measurements.

[1]  Andrew A Pellett,et al.  Doppler Aliasing , 2005, Echocardiography.

[2]  John Y. N. Cho,et al.  Multi-PRI Signal Processing for the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar. Part I: Clutter Filtering , 2005 .

[3]  A Kitabatake,et al.  Noninvasive evaluation of aortic regurgitation by continuous-wave Doppler echocardiography. , 1986, Circulation.

[4]  M. Fink,et al.  Coherent plane-wave compounding for very high frame rate ultrasonography and transient elastography , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[5]  T K Song,et al.  An Efficient Motion Estimation and Compensation Method for Ultrasound Synthetic Aperture Imaging , 2002, Ultrasonic imaging.

[6]  C. Burckhardt,et al.  A new pulsed wave Doppler ultrasound system to measure blood velocities beyond the Nyquist limit , 1995, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[7]  Lasse Lovstakken,et al.  Shunt flow evaluation in congenital heart disease based on two-dimensional speckle tracking. , 2014, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[8]  H. Torp,et al.  Simultaneous quantification of flow and tissue velocities based on multi-angle plane wave imaging , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[9]  Lasse Lovstakken,et al.  Effects of reverberations and clutter filtering in pulsed Doppler using sparse sequences , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

[10]  David R. Anderson,et al.  Multimodel Inference , 2004 .

[11]  上嶋 徳久,et al.  A new echocardiographic method for identifying vortex flow in the left ventricle : numerical validation , 2009 .

[12]  Mickael Tanter,et al.  High-contrast ultrafast imaging of the heart , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

[13]  Peter Homel,et al.  Vector flow mapping in obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy to assess the relationship of early systolic left ventricular flow and the mitral valve. , 2014, Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

[14]  Clifford M. Hurvich,et al.  Regression and time series model selection in small samples , 1989 .

[15]  Pravas Mahapatra,et al.  Two Methods of Ambiguity Resolution in Pulse Doppler Weather Radars , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

[16]  J. Jensen,et al.  In-vivo synthetic aperture flow imaging in medical ultrasound , 2003, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[17]  Mickael Tanter,et al.  Transthoracic ultrafast Doppler imaging of human left ventricular hemodynamic function , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

[18]  Piero Tortoli,et al.  Real-time vector velocity assessment through multigate doppler and plane waves , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

[19]  Petra Kaufmann,et al.  Two Dimensional Phase Unwrapping Theory Algorithms And Software , 2016 .

[20]  Kageyoshi Katakura,et al.  Non-equally-spaced pulse transmission for non-aliasing ultrasonic pulsed Doppler measurement , 1992 .

[21]  O. Bonnefous,et al.  Time Domain Formulation of Pulse-Doppler Ultrasound and Blood Velocity Estimation by Cross Correlation , 1986, Ultrasonic imaging.

[22]  Damien Garcia,et al.  Two-Dimensional Intraventricular Flow Mapping by Digital Processing Conventional Color-Doppler Echocardiography Images , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[23]  J. Jensen,et al.  High frame-rate blood vector velocity imaging using plane waves: Simulations and preliminary experiments , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[24]  T. Loupas,et al.  On the performance of regression and step-initialized IIR clutter filters for color Doppler systems in diagnostic medical ultrasound , 1995, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[25]  D. Zrnic,et al.  Doppler weather radar , 1979, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[26]  Pierre Tabary,et al.  Design and test of an operational triple-PRT Doppler scheme for the French radar network , 2005 .

[27]  J. Rojo-álvarez,et al.  Noninvasive assessment of ejection intraventricular pressure gradients. , 2004, Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

[28]  V. Chandrasekar,et al.  Clutter Suppression for Staggered PRT Waveforms , 2008 .

[29]  Javier Bermejo,et al.  Intraventricular vortex properties in nonischemic dilated cardiomyopathy. , 2014, American journal of physiology. Heart and circulatory physiology.

[30]  K. Kristoffersen,et al.  Clutter filter design for ultrasound color flow imaging , 2002, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[31]  Lasse Lovstakken,et al.  Eigen-based clutter filter design for ultrasound color flow imaging: a review , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[32]  Steven C. Albers,et al.  Two- and Three-Dimensional De-aliasing of Doppler Radar Velocities , 1988 .

[33]  K. Egstrup,et al.  Pseudonormal and restrictive filling patterns predict left ventricular dilation and cardiac death after a first myocardial infarction: a serial color M-mode Doppler echocardiographic study. , 2000, Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

[34]  Andrey S. Krylov,et al.  Regularizing method for phase antialiasing in color doppler flow mapping , 2014, Neurocomputing.

[35]  Hans Torp,et al.  Comparison between cross-correlation and auto-correlation technique in color flow imaging , 1993 .

[36]  Juan Esteban Arango,et al.  3D ultrafast ultrasound imaging in vivo , 2014, Physics in medicine and biology.

[37]  J.T. Powers,et al.  An axial velocity estimator for ultrasound blood flow imaging, based on a full evaluation of the Doppler equation by means of a two-dimensional autocorrelation approach , 1995, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[38]  Damien Garcia,et al.  Doppler vortography: a color Doppler approach to quantification of intraventricular blood flow vortices. , 2014, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[39]  H. Torp.  Clutter rejection filters in color flow imaging: a theoretical approach , 1997, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[40]  C. Werner,et al.  Application of an Interferometric Phase Unwrapping Technique to Dealiasing of Weather Radar VelocitY Fields , 1996 .

[41]  Gesse Eduardo Calvo Nogueira,et al.  A nonuniform sampled coherent pulsed Doppler ultrasonic velocimeter with increased velocity range , 1999, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[42]  K. Kristoffersen,et al.  An extended autocorrelation method for estimation of blood velocity , 1997, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[43]  J Bercoff,et al.  Ultrafast compound doppler imaging: providing full blood flow characterization , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[44]  Damien Garcia,et al.  Unsupervised dealiasing and denoising of color-Doppler data , 2011, Medical Image Anal..