Key result
A numerical framework successfully generated synthetic clinical-like cardiac color Doppler imaging with realistic artifacts to evaluate and improve Doppler estimation techniques.
Why the study?
Color Doppler imaging is subject to artifacts such as aliasing and clutter, and simulations are needed to help mitigate these issues for better intracardiac flow analysis.
The development of a synthetic cardiac color Doppler dataset provides a valuable tool for evaluating Doppler estimation techniques and training neural networks to improve imaging quality.
Synthetic Doppler datasets enable controlled technique evaluation and NN training; leaves open clinical translation without prospective validation.
Color Doppler imaging (CDI) is the modality of choice for simultaneous visualization of myocardium and intracavitary flow over a wide scan area. This visualization modality is subject to several sources of error, the main ones being aliasing and clutter. Mitigation of these artifacts is a major concern for better analysis of intracardiac flow. One option to address these issues is through simulations. In this article, we present a numerical framework for generating clinical-like CDI. Synthetic blood vector fields were obtained from a patient-specific computational fluid dynamics CFD model. Realistic texture and clutter artifacts were simulated from real clinical ultrasound cineloops. We simulated several scenarios highlighting the effects of 1) flow acceleration; 2) wall clutter; and 3) transmit wavefronts, on Doppler velocities. As a comparison, an "ideal" color Doppler was also simulated, without these harmful effects. This synthetic dataset is made publicly available and can be used to evaluate the quality of Doppler estimation techniques. Besides, this approach can be seen as a first step toward the generation of comprehensive datasets for training neural networks to improve the quality of Doppler imaging.
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Vixège et al. (2022) studied this question. Numerical framework for generating synthetic cardiac color Doppler vs. Ideal color Doppler was evaluated on Simulation of clinical-like CDI with realistic texture and clutter artifacts. A numerical framework successfully generated synthetic clinical-like cardiac color Doppler imaging with realistic artifacts to evaluate and improve Doppler estimation techniques.
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