Reconstruction of 3D Flow from Multiple Echo Doppler Views

We present a new method for reconstructing a 3D vector field from multiple 3D Pulsed Wave Doppler echo images. A weakness of Doppler imaging is that only a 1D projection of the true 3D velocity (the component of the velocity parallel to the echo beam direction) is measured. We propose a method to use registered multiple Doppler views to calculate 3D flow vectors using a Least Mean Squares (LMS) minimisation process. Spatial and temporal averaging are used to improve reconstruction accuracy. We investigate the effect on accuracy caused by changes in view angle. We relate our work to clinical practice by using noise values from real data. We report experiments on simulated and phantom data. Simulation data results show that when angles between views are greater than 40◦ (which can be clinically achieved), 3D flow may be reconstructed with an error of approximately 15% velocity magnitude and 15◦ vector angle. Phantom data results support these findings.