Ultrasound Vector Flow Mapping in Left Ventricle: A Do it Yourself Study

Ultrasound-based vector flow mapping (VFM) has drawn considerable interest and may impact how left ventricular (LV) function is assessed in the clinical workflow. However, VFM is yet widely available. Only a few ultrasound vendors (e.g. BK Ultrasound, Hitachi Aloka, and Mindray) offer VFM packages on their systems. Furthermore, some research VFM packages require non-standard clinical equipment (e.g. unfocused plane wave transmit) or proprietary software (e.g. access to raw Doppler and speckle tracking data). This study is motivated to re-implement a published VFM method without any vendor's technical support and proprietary software while using standard clinical equipment and its output. Initial validation of our do-it-yourself (DYI) VFM implementation was done by qualitatively comparing 2D VFM measurements of our system with those of a clinical system (Aloka, Hitachi, Japan) for 4 human subjects. In particular, flow measurements obtained by our DIY methods were assessed by two board-certified ultrasound radiologists. Both radiologists agreed that streamlines generated by the proposed DIY approach were visually consistent with gross hemodynamic patterns produced by the above-mentioned clinical VFM workstation. Further developments of the proposed method may accelerate the translation of VFM into the clinical workflow.