ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

3aPA7. Correction of errors in Doppler peak velocity measurements made with commercial ultrasound systems.

Andrew J. Winkler

Junru Wu

Dept. of Phys., Univ. of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405

Commercial Duplex ultrasound systems primarily measure peak velocity of blood flow to provide information in diagnosing vascular disease. However, due to errors caused by intrinsic spectral broadening (ISB), the accuracy decreases as Doppler angle increases. In general, vascular technologists keep the Doppler angle under 60(degrees). Since most vessels in the body run almost parallel with the skin surface, any criteria requiring a Doppler angle of say 45(degrees) or less would be difficult to achieve. Using the transverse Doppler equation [Newhouse et al., 2091--2098 (1984)] as a correction for ISB, in cojunction with the classical Doppler equation, much more accurate peak velocity measurements were obtained at Doppler angle as high as 80(degrees).