Doppler vortography: a color Doppler approach for quantification of the intraventricular blood flow vortices

摘要

We propose a new approach for quantification of intracardiac vorticity – Doppler vortography – based on conventional color Doppler images. Doppler vortography relies on the centrosymmetric properties of the vortices. Such properties induce particular symmetries in the Doppler flow data which can be exploited to describe the vortices quantitatively. For this purpose, a kernel filter was developed to derive a parameter –the blood vortex signature (BVS) – that allows detecting the main intracardiac vortices and estimating their core vorticities. The reliability of Doppler vortography was assessed in mock Doppler fields issued from simulations and in vitro data. Doppler vortography was also tested in patients and compared with vector flow mapping by echocardiography. Strong correlations were obtained between the Doppler vortography-derived and the ground-truth vorticities (in silico: r² = 0.98, in vitro: r² = 0.86, in vivo: r² = 0.89). Our results demonstrated that Doppler vortography is a potentially promising echocardiographic tool for quantification of vortex flow in the left ventricle.