Color Flow Imaging with Intravascular Ultrasound



Background

Intravascular ultrasound is a widely used method of imaging the coronary arteries in patients with atherosclerotic disease to determine the efficacy of, and candidacy for, Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty (PCTA) and endovascular stenting. Successful interventions should increase blood flow downstream of the treated obstruction. However, conventional B-Scan imaging poorly presents the effects of therapy on blood flow. B-Mode imaging can show the extent of the lumen, but not the presence of flow. Hence there is great need for real-time, color coded blood velocity information to aid interventional cardiologists.

Here are two images from a 64 element, 20MHz IVUS system. Both images present color coded blood speed information superimposed over the gray scale B-Scan image. These images are from an in-vivo investigation of a pig femoral artery conducted in our lab. Images were contructed from radio frequency ultrasound data acquired from a real-time scanner operating at approximately a 10.5 Hz frame rate.



A 1024x512 JPEG image of the above is available here.


These are frames from color flow movies available here.

Publications

  • J. Crowe, B.M. Shapo, D.N. Stephens, D. Bleam, M.J. Eberle, J. Kovatch, R.J. Lederman, M O'Donnell "Coronary Artery Flow Imaging with an Intraluminal Array" IEEE Trans. on Ultrasonics, Fer., and Freq. Control (submitted)
  • J.R. Crowe, M O'Donnell, " Quantitative Flow Imaging with Intravascular Ultrasound" 24th Symposium on Ultrasonic Imaging and Tissue Characterization, June 1999
  • J. Crowe,B.M. Shapo,D.N. Stephens,D. Bleam,M.J. Eberle,J. Kovatch,R.J. Lederman,M O'Donnell" Coronary Artery Flow Imaging with an Intraluminal Array" IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium Proceedings, pp. 1481-1484, 1996.
  • M. O'Donnell, M. J. Eberle, D. N. Stephens, J. L. Litzza, B. M. Shapo, J. R. Crowe, C. D. Choi, J. J. Chen, D.W.M. Muller, J.A. Kovach, R. J. Lederman, R.C. Ziegenbein, K. SanVicente, and D. Bleam,"Catheter Arrays: Can Intravascular Ultrasound Make a Difference in Managing Coronary Artery Disease? (invited paper)," IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium Proceedings, 1997, pp. 1251-1254.


    Correspondence:

    Link to: http://bul.eecs.umich.edu/research/ivus/ivus_color/
    Last modified by: crowej@umich.edu