Angle-insensitive flow measurement using Doppler bandwidth

The ability to measure the velocity of blood flow independent of the orientation of the blood vessel could aid in evaluation of many disease processes, such as coronary lesions. Conventional ultrasonic Doppler techniques require knowledge of the beam-to-flow angle, and the Doppler effect vanishes when this angle is 90/spl deg/. By employing a spherically symmetrical range cell and the Doppler bandwidth instead of the Doppler shift, preliminary results show that flow measurement of ideal uniform flow that has a blunt velocity profile can be made without knowledge of tile orientation of the vessel, even when the angle of orientation is around 90/spl deg/. But when the technique is applied to a real how that has a parabolic velocity profile, the Doppler bandwidth decreases as the beam-to-flow angle increases. Although the Doppler bandwidth is sensitive to the transducer angle in this situation, the error in determining flow velocity might be acceptable if the transducer angle can be estimated to be within a small range. For this method to be regarded as practical for clinical use, however, a consistent relationship between bandwidth and flow velocity must be demonstrated over some set of clinically relevant conditions. The experimental techniques and results for how measurements of both the ideal uniform flow and the real flow are presented in this paper.