The main purpose of this PhD project is to develop an ultrasonic method for 3D vector flow imaging. The motivation is to advance the field of velocity estimation in ultrasound, which plays an important role in the clinic. The velocity of blood has components in all three spatial dimensions, yet conventional methods can estimate only the axial component.
The Transverse Oscillation (TO) method has turned out to be a promising approach to determine all three velocity components, which can estimates both the axial and the lateral velocity components. The TO method has been extended to 3d vector velocity imaging in the PhD project by Michael Pihl, and it is now possible to measure the full three dimensional velocity vectors in a plane in real time, and the first in-vivo acquisition for a single plane has been made.
The aim of the PhD project is to further develop the method for full 3D vector velocity imaging in a volume in the clinic. Methods for increasing the acquisition speed an accuracy of the velocity should be developed based on the techniques already developed at CFU. The methods should then be implemented on an experimental ultrasound scanner at CFU and evaluated in flow phantoms and on human volunters.
The project is focused on increasing both the measurement and accuracy and the speed by employing spread spectrum and synthetic aperture techniques.
About Simon
Simon holds a Master in physics from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. His master project was within biophysics at the biocomplexity group at NBI, where stem cells' role in the onset of cancer was investigated in a stochastic model.