Adaptive Hybrid of Color Doppler and Ultrasound Speckle Image Velocimetry for the Accurate Measurement of Blood Flow

In this study, adaptive hybrid (AH) scheme is proposed to enhance the measurement accuracy of conventional CD method to acquire the 2-dimensional velocity field of blood flows. It can offer the assistance of the velocity field information measured preliminarily using ultrasound speckle image velocimetry (SIV) technique. Consequently, erroneous vectors in the CD results were replaced with the SIV results. The performance of the proposed AH method was validated by varying flow rate and insonation angle. We compared the AH method with the CD and SIV methods in an agarose vessel model. In vitro validation experiment demonstrated that the proposed AH method can measure a 2-dimensional velocity field with improved accuracy. In vivo validation was conducted for venous flow in the human great saphenous vein. These datasets offer the in vitro and in vivo experimental results for the validation of its performances. The AH method was confirmed by checking constant volumetric flow rate under in vivo conditions.