The clinical assessment of blood flow is highly important for the diagnosis of cardiac disease, used for the evaluation of both systolic and diastolic function of the heart, and is key for evaluating abnormal flow jets due to heart valve stenosis and regurgitation.
Recent advances in matrix array transducer technology allows for the acquisition of real-time three-dimensional ultrasound images in echocardiography.
Currently, state-of-the-art commercial 2D matrix array transducer technology for 3D ultrasound imaging is based on in-probe beamforming required for reducing channel count. This imposes limitations with regards to beamforming flexibility, and limits for instance the utilization of modern ultrafast imaging techniques such as diverging wave imaging. Further, while cardiac blood flow is inherently three-dimensional, only a one-dimensional Doppler measurement is currently available, which make 3D flow images angle-dependent and difficult to interpret.
The ultrasound research community have recently shown the potential of ultrafast 3D imaging based on a fully connected 2D matrix array in both cardiac and vascular domains, and methods have been proposed to overcome the angle-dependency of Doppler imaging based on e.g. 3D vector-Doppler from multiple image views, or algorithms for 3D tracking blood speckle or contrast microbubbles.
When based on ultrafast data acquisition techniques, thousands of images per second can be obtained and used to improve the quantitative abilities in ultrasound imaging, leveraging both a high temporal resolution as well as robust measurements of both low and high blood velocities.