Visualization of coronary blood flow by color Doppler imaging with a transesophageal approach.

To examine whether CBF can be imaged by color Doppler technique, we visualized CBF using a transesophageal color Doppler imaging system. In 36 of 39 patients with normal coronary arteriograms after heart surgery, the LMT and the proximal LAD were clearly imaged by 2-dimensional echocardiography. Among them, CBF was coded mainly in blue in 32 patients, showing that the flow runs from proximal to distal. In some cases, yellowish and/or reddish components were seen, suggesting the occurrence of aliasing associated with augmentation of flow velocity or flow turbulence. The fast Fourier transformation spectrogram of the pulsed Doppler sampled in the colored flow showed a typical flow velocity pattern of the LAD, which mainly consisted of a predominantly diastolic component. These results indicate that the transesophageal color Doppler technique is advantageous in noninvasively imaging CBF. It should be further sought whether flow abnormality due to coronary stenosis could be determined by this technique.