An Experimental Ultrasonic Scanner for Time Resolved 3-D Flow Field Measurement

In medical ultrasound, the improvement of measurement accuracy in color flow imaging is still a very demanding goal since the scanner is limited by constraints such as transducer center frequency restrictions or the acoustic field emission intensity set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The authors report on the development of an ultrasonic scanner whose signal and image processing algorithms in particular are designed to tolerate, to a very high degree, always-experienced tissue motion in in vivo experiments. To calibrate the system, a blood-flow-mimicking phantom was built and tested successfully. The phantom shows natural tissue properties and has a wallless designed flow channel. Furthermore, they report on scan results for both phantom and human subjects