A novel simulation environment for testing experimental and established ultrasonic blood flow imaging techniques

Imaging and quantitative analysis of complex flow fields in the cardiovascular system using ultrasound remains challenging. An important limitation of the traditionally used one-dimensional (1D) Doppler techniques is the beam-to-flow angle dependency, hampering the measurement of complex arterial blood flow. Research has focused on 2D velocity estimators but limited effort has been done to compare their performance. One of the reasons is that validation of algorithms in complex flow conditions is difficult, as ground-truth information is not always available. We therefore coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with ultrasound imaging simulations to obtain realistic radiofrequent (RF) signals from clinically relevant flow patterns