Steered transverse oscillations for improved 3D velocity estimation

Estimating 3D blood velocities using ultrasound imaging is a current challenge in cardiac blood flow microvascular imaging. It would greatly help practitioners avoid reconstructing a 3D flow from a sequence of 2D images, as is currently done in clinical practice. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a steered 3D transverse oscillation method based on a transverse oscillation pipeline for 3D ultrasound velocity estimation of blood flow. To evaluate the accuracy of the proposed method, several simulations are performed for synthetic straight parabolic flow phantoms rotated at different angles in the xy-plane. Comparisons of the obtained 3D fields in magnitude and angle are made with the Transverse Oscillations method (3D-TOs), a 3D multi-angle cross-beam Doppler (3D-MAD) technique, and a ground truth velocity. The proposed method is more accurate than all previous techniques in mean angle and mean magnitude, and reduces the mean angle error by at least half compared to 3D-TOs.