Doppler Ultrasound Blood Flow Measurement System for Assessing Coronary Revascularization

This work describes a Doppler ultrasound system for measuring blood flow. The system is intended to be used for assessing coronary implants and bypass operations. Quantifying the blood flow through these implants/bypasses is an important task to ensure the chirurgical process, thus, reducing both the post-chirurgical and death risks. The system is based on an open architecture that is portable and lowcost, incorporating the advantages of expensive systems with dedicated hardware. It incorporates a pulsed-wave bidirectional Doppler ultrasound flow detector working at 8 MHz. Signal conditioning, detection of direction, signal processing, spectrogram displaying, parameters calculation, and a database handling subsystem complete the system. A graphical user interface is provided for controlling and monitoring the whole system. Doppler signal is processed using both Fourier Transform-based and Parametric Modelbased algorithms, having the facility to incorporate alternative higher-resolution spectral estimation methods. The system is being assessed in coronary revascularization.