PC-based system for quantification of medical color Doppler images

The least invasive method to image blood flow in vivo is Duplex or color Doppler (CD) ultrasound. Until now, color Doppler examinations carry only qualitative information. The information available in a color Doppler image is: (1) density of detectable vessels (reflected by the color pixel density) and (2) local flow velocity under assumption of a Doppler angle φ=0°. To achieve an objective and reliable quantitation of these parameters and thereby describe the vascularisation we extended our tissue characterization system by a PC-based development which extracts and evaluates the information from the digitized CD image, adds this information to the knowledge base and finally combines it with the results of texture analysis