Cardiac vector flow mapping from ultrafast doppler sequences

Left intraventricular blood flow follows a range of patterns that are mostly overlooked when using conventional ultrasound Doppler techniques. Vortices, in particular, as a blood redirection mechanism, could provide important information on a patient's cardiovascular health. They are not usually visualized, however, due to the need for 2D velocity vector visualization, and their transient nature, too fast for conventional Doppler to sample adequately. In this work, we combine an ultrafast Doppler setup with a vector flow mapping technique based on Doppler estimation and an incompressibility hypothesis to visualize fast 2D intraventricular flow patterns in two dimensions. The same fast sequence used for blood velocity imaging is also used to visualize myocardial dynamics, thereby giving a full picture of cardiac motion and hemodynamics.