Jason Voorneveld

Research:

The assessment of intraventricular blood flow patterns promises early stage diagnostic value for the onset of heart failure. Until recently, echocardiographic techniques for measuring blood flow in the cardiac chambers have been restricted in dimensionality (1D/2D) and/or frame rate (<100 fps), limiting the accuracy of obtainable flow measurements. Recent technological advances have made high frame rate 3D ultrasound feasible, allowing for 4000 to 5000 frames to be captured during a single heartbeat. However, blood is not a particularly strong ultrasound reflector, making blood flow quantification difficult even at very high frame rates. Therefore we use ultrasound contrast agents, tiny (<10µm) gas filled microbubbles made with a lipid shell, which strongly scatter ultrasound waves allowing us to measure blood flow by tracking the microbubbles.

This project aims at developing and validating software and acquisition protocols suitable for quantifying blood flow in the left ventricle. A classical flow measurement technique, well established in the field of optical flow measurement, called particle imaging velocimetry (PIV) will be applied in both 2D (Figure 1) and 3D (Figure 2) to the high frame rate, contrast enhanced, ultrasound acquisitions in order to create time resolved vector maps of the blood flow over the cardiac cycle. These vector maps reveal the complex flow patterns within the ventricle, allowing for early diagnosis of cardiac dysfunction. Early diagnosis is essential for effective treatment of heart failure.