252 IEEE TRANSACTIONS O N ULTRASONICS, FERROELECTRICS, AND FREQUENCY CONTROL, VOL. 46, NO 1,JANU.

4RY 1999

rres ce -

Doppler Angle and Flow Velocity Estimations the center of the conduit, the mean frequency equals t o the
Using the Classic and Transverse energy peak frequency theoretically The mean frequency, how-
Doppler Effects ever, strongly depends on the velocity gradient of the conduit,
and it is likely to be affected by the wall-thump filter or low
Bor-Ray Lee, Huihua Kenny Chiang", Member, IEEE, frequency disturbance for low-velocity flow
Cheng-Deng Kuo, Win-Li Lin, a n d San-KanLee The classic Doppler equation (1) can be used to estimate
a blood flow velocity, if its Doppler angle 0 is known In clin-
Abstract-Current clinical Doppler ultrasound systems ical applications, the Doppler angle can be determined from
could only measure the flow vector parallel to the ultra- the duplex scan image of ultrasound The scan image shows
sound beam axis, and the knowledge of the Doppler angle the Doppler ultrasound beam axis and the Doppler sample vol-
(beam-to-flow angle) is needed to calculate the real flow ve- ume on the B-scan tissue image, including the image of the
locity. Currently, the Doppler angle is determined visually blood vessel [3] However, many difficulties are involved in de-
by manually aligning a vessel axis marker along the blood termining the Doppler angle For example, it may be difficult to
vessel on the duplex scan image of the ultrasound. The ap- obtain a longitudinal cross-section scan of a blood vessel in the
plication of this procedure is often limited by practical con-
ultrasound scanning plane to determine the Doppler angle In
straints; therefore, measurements are not reliable. In order
to overcome this problem, we developed a simple Doppler addition, it is difficult to determine a three-dimensional (3-D)
angle and flow velocity estimation method using a combi- Doppler angle from a two-dimensional (2-D) ultrasound scan
nation of the classic and transverse Doppler effects. This image.
method uses only a single focused annular array transducer Recently, several Doppler ultrasound methods for 2-D and
to estimate the Doppler angle and the flow velocity. We 3-D flow velocity estimation have been developed These tech-
have verified experimentally that this method is successful niques used two transducers to measure the 2-D flow vector,
for measuring constant flow in a flow phantom between 4 5 O and three transducers for 3-D measurements [4]-[6] Newhouse
and 80' Doppler angle. The standard deviation of the esti- et al [a], [7]and Censor et al [SIused two transducers to esti-
mated Doppler angles is less than 4.5O. This method could
mate the 3-D flow vector by supplementing the classic Doppler
be implemented easily in medical Doppler ultrasound sys-
equation (1) with the transverse Doppler equation (2) The
tems to automatically estimate the Doppler angle and the
flow velocity. need of using at least two Doppler transducers limit its imple-
mentation in medical ultrasound systems Thus, an automatic
flow velocity estimation has not been implemented yet in cur-
rent medical Doppler ultrasound systems
1. INTRODUCTION
Newhouse et a1 [7],Censor et a1 [8], and Newhouse and Reid
[9] have exploited the characteristics of the Doppler ultrasound
EDICAL ULTRASOUND uses the Doppler effect, which as- system using a focused transducer to transmit a focused ultra-
sumes an infinitely wide, single-frequency ultrasound sound beam, and they have established the transverse Doppler
beam crossing a uniform flow to measure the flow velocity. theory describing the relationship between the flow velocity v
The ultrasound beam is scattered from particles carried by the and the bandwidth of the Doppler spectrum Bd
flow, and the ultrasound frequency is changed by the amount of
velocity-induced Doppler shift frequency. The classic Doppler
equation is given by:

where W and F represent, respectively, the effective diameter

and the focal length of a focused ultrasound transducer, and 8
is the Doppler angle Then (2) can be interpreted as a line of
where f d is the energy peak frequency of the Doppler spectrum
scatters intersect the acoustic field of the transducer, and the
[l],8 is the Doppler angle (the beam-to-flow angle), X is the
received bandwidth of the Doppler spectrum broadens as the
wavelength of the ultrasound, and v is the flow velocity. Some-
scatters crossing the focused ultrasound beam [1],[9].
times, f d is referred to as the mean frequency of the Doppler
Tortoli and Newhouse [1] theoretically derived and demon-
spectrum [2] rather than the energy peak frequency used in this
strated that the maximum frequency of the measured Doppler
article. When the center of the sample volume is positioned at
spectrum equals the Doppler shift frequency (fd) plus one-half
Manuscript received February 23, 1998; accepted July 21, 1998. of the Doppler spectrum bandwidth ( B d / 2 ) The maximum fre-
Parts of this work were supported by the National Science Council, quency fmax is
R.O.C., and the Veterans General Hospital and Yang-Ming Univer-
sity joint research projects.
B.-R. Lee and H. K. Chiang are with the Institute of (3)
Biomedical Engineering, National Yang-Min University, Taipei
112, Taiwan, Republic of China (*corresponding author's e-mail: Tortoli and Newhouse [1] also have demonstrated that, for
chiang@bme.ym.edu.tw).
C.-D. Kuo and S.-K. Lee are with the Taichung Veterans General
a known Doppler angle, ( 3 ) can be used to obtain a better esti-
Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China. mation of the flow velocity than the classic Doppler equation.
W.-L. Lin is with the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, Equation (3) also has been implemented for blood velocity es-
Republic of China. timation [lo].

0885-3010/99$10.00 @ 1999 IEEE

Authorized licensed use limited to: Bursa Uludag Universitesi. Downloaded on September 03,2021 at 10:42:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 LEE et al.: FLOW VELOCITY AND TRANSVERSE DOPPLER EFFECTS
. A color Doppler ultrasound system (Vingmed CFM-725,
e; \
Flow vector
. sample volume is kept at 1.5-mm long and is set at the focus.
:::;2yy Perpendicular
component
./
Fig. 1. The schematic of the Doppler angle and flow velocity mea-
surement uses a single focused transducer.
In this paper, we propose and experimentally verify a simple
Doppler angle and flow velocity estimation method using the
combination of the classic and transverse Doppler effects. We
estimate the Doppler angle and the flow velocity by using the
combination of fd (1)and fmax (3). Estimating the Doppler an-
gle and the flow velocity (the magnitude) is much simpler than
estimating the 3-D flow vectors, as proposed in other Doppler
ultrasound flow velocity estimating methods [4]-[8]. The major
advantage of this method is that only a single focused trans-
ducer is needed. Thus, this method can be easily implemented
in medical ultrasound systems to enable an automatic estima-
tion of Doppler angle and flow velocity.
11. THEORY
The schematic setup of the flow velocity measurement is
shown in Fig. 1. For measurement of a single flow line inter-
cepted by a symmetrically focused ultrasound beam, the flow
vector can be treated as the combination of two flow vectors;
one is parallel to the ultrasound beam axis, and the other is per-
pendicular t o the ultrasound beam axis. These two flow vectors
are represented by v . cos i9 and v . sin 0 in (l),(2), and (3). Al-
though either (1) and (2) or (1) and (3) can be used to derive
the Doppler angle, we chose (1) and (3). The lower portion
of the Doppler spectrum is likely to be affected by the wall-
thump filter, sample volume size, and sample volume position.
Thus, (a),the full bandwidth of the Doppler spectrum was not
used; instead, (3), the maximum Doppler frequency was used
to derive the Doppler angle (4):
(4)
The flow velocity can be estimated by (1) or (3) after 19 is
determined. However, the flow velocity, v , also can be derived
by v . cos 0 and v . sin 0 in (1) and ( 3 ) :
(5)
Authorized licensed use limited to: Bursa Uludag Universitesi. Downloaded on September 03,2021 at 10:42:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
253
111. EXPERIMENTS
A. Doppler System
VingMed Sound, Horten, Norway), with a 4-elements annular
array transducer, operating at 2.5 MHz, 1.47 cm in diameter,
and 7.8 cm in focal length was used in our study. The length of
The pulsed repetition frequency (PRF) was 4 kHz. The CFM-
725 uses a complex discrete Fourier transform to compute the
Doppler spectrum within 1 ms.
Annular array transducers are widely used in medical ul-
trasound systems. One major advantage of the annular array
transducer is that it forms a symmetrically focused ultrasound
beam and has the same degree of spatial resolution in any plane
perpendicular to the beam axis. Under the assumption that a
flow has a single flow direction, the 3-D flow vector always can
be decomposed into two component vectors, one parallel to the
ultrasound beam axis, the other perpendicular to it, as shown in
Fig. 1. This symmetrically focused property of the transducer
is exploited and used to estimate the Doppler angle and flow
velocity [8]. The symmetric characteristics of the transducer
enables the measurement of the two flow vectors (parallel and
perpendicular), and they are inherently included in (1) and (3).
B. Flow Phantom
A UHDC (Shelley Medical Imaging Technologies, London,
Ontario, Canada) flow phantom, which can be programmed
to generate constant and pulsatile flows, was used in this re-
search. Two constant flows with mean velocities of 18.9 and
25.2 cm/s (Reynolds number = 1288 and 1717) were generated
in a 9.5 mm internal diameter latex tube. The conduit was
1 meter long and was immersed horizontally in a tank. The
UHDC blood mimic fluid was used as the scattering source in
the flow. The density of the fluid was 1.01 g/ml, and the dy-
namic viscosity was 1.3415 cp (1 cp = lo-' g/sec.cm).
The relationship between the maximum flow velocity (vmax)
and the mean flow velocity ( V ) can be represented as a function
of Reynolds number [ll].The value of vmax/V is between 1.5
to 1.8 for the corresponding Reynolds numbers, 1200 and 1700.
The estimated vmax/V of the two constant Aows are within this
range (1.58 for V = 18.9 cm/s, and 1.55 for i7 = 25.2 cm/s).
C. Signal Processing
The real-time Doppler spectra were retrieved from the
VingMed CFM-725 Doppler ultrasound system and used in
the analysis. For Doppler spectrum calculation, a duration of
2 seconds Doppler signal, 325 spectra were averaged to reduce
the noise. However, in our preliminary experiment, a spectrum
of 100 times averaged is good enough for Doppler angle and
flow velocity estimation. A typical Doppler spectrum of the
25.2 cm/s flow measured at 60" Doppler angle is shown in
Fig. 2. The maximum Doppler frequency fmax is defined as
the intersection of the power spectra and an empirically deter-
mined threshold set at -6 dB [12].
The setting of the threshold for fmax should be empirically
determined for each Doppler ultrasound system because each
system has its own signal processing circuits and Doppler gain
 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ULTRASONICS, FERROELECTRICS, AND FREQUENCY CONTROL, VOL. 46, NO. 1 ~ JANUARY 1999

500
n
2 450
v
+,400
0
5 350
2 300
L4
250
f 200
-0
150
2E 100
\
!
3
200
I
400 600 800
-6dB
1000 1200 1400
50
0
7

45
25.2 cm/s

50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85
Frequency (Hz) Measured Angle

Fig. 2 . A typical Doppler spectrum of a 25.2 cm/s flow measured at

60' Doppler angle.

curve. In this experiment, the threshold is determined by cal- 450 7 I

ibrating a set of estimated Doppler angles to a set of known
angles (e.g., 50", 60", and 70') set in the UHDC flow phantom.
350
D . Sample. Volume h
2 300
In this research, the Doppler sample volume was positioned $!2 250
at the center of the conduit, and the size of the sample volume lG
was kept at the minimum, 1.5 mm, in VingMed CFM-725. This $j 200
0
arrangement could minimize the effect of changing the sample a
Q 150
volume size and position on f d and fmax [13], [14].
2
i-

E.Flow Measurement
Two different flows were generated in the UHDC flow phan-
tom. The measured maximum Doppler frequency fmax and the
energy peak frequency f d of these two flows in 12 measure-
ments are shown in Figs. 3(a) and (b), respectively. The solid
lines represent the mean value, and the error bars represent
the standard deviations. We observed that fmax and f d de-
crease with the increase of the Doppler angle. After finax and
fd were measured, the Doppler angles and flow velocities were
estimated using (4) and ( 5 ) , respectively. The calculated re-
sults are shown in Figs. 4 and 5 . The standard deviation of the
estimated Doppler angles is less than 4.5", and the standard
deviation of the estimated flow velocities is less than 4.7 cm/s.
IV. DISCUSSION
We have experimentally demonstrated a Doppler angle
and flow velocity estimation method by combining the classic
Doppler equation (I) and transverse Doppler equation (3). This
method has two major advantages. It is very simple, only one
focused transducer is needed. It can be implemented directly
in current medical Doppler ultrasound system with a clinical
annular array transducer. The Doppler angle and flow velocity
estimation method is very important for obtaining quantita-
tive flow velocity measurements. Currently, the Doppler angle
.- 100
2 50
0- 1 I
45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85
Measured Angle
Fig. 3. The measured (a) maximum frequency fmax, and (b) energy
peak frequency fd of the 18.9 and 25.2 cm/s flows.
is estimated visually by using a vessel axis marker on the ul-
trasound duplex scan image. Therefore, the current methods
are limited because the vessel orientation needs to be manually
set by the operator, and the vessel must lie in the ultrasound
scanning plane.
Measurements shown in Figs. 4 and 5 demonstrate that the
application of this method for Doppler angle and flow velocity
estimation is valid for a wide range of angles between 45" and
80". For Doppler angles larger than 80",the lower frequency
portion of the Doppler shift frequency spectrum might be fil-
tered out by the wall-thump filter of the ultrasound receiver
Thus, the energy peak frequency f d of the filtered Doppler spec-
trum may be overestimated; and the Doppler angle may be
underestimated, especially for flows with a lower velocity such
as the 18.9 cm/s flow measured at 85", in Fig. 5. However, a

Authorized licensed use limited to: Bursa Uludag Universitesi. Downloaded on September 03,2021 at 10:42:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
LEE et al.: FLOW VELOCITY AND TRANSVERSE DOPPLER EFFECTS 255

90 1.0

85
--
80
75 Wall-thump filter
W

?70
$65
I-
(d

.g 60
x
55
-25.2 cm/s
50
45 - 1 - L I .
. ..I
0- I 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400
45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 Frequency (Hz)
Measured Angle
Fig. 6. The energy peak frequency f d of the Doppler spectrum of the
Fig. 4. The actual (X-axis) and estimated (Y-axis) Doppler angles of 25.2 cm/s flow measured at 60' Doppler angle before and after the
two flows with different flow velocity. wall thump filter.

0.5
n

B 0.45
0.4
*sr
-$
*g 0.35
0.3
0.25
Ag 0.2
E: 0.15
;
t i

i.-o:: -TI- -e-

18.9 cm/s
25.2 cm/s
0 __

45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 -200 a 200 400 600 800 1000

Measured Angle Frequency (Hz)

Fig. 5 . The calculated maximum flow velocities of two different flows Fig. 7. Three Doppler spectra of the 25.2 cm/s flow measured at 50°,
measured at different Doppler angles (maximum flow velocity # 70°, and 8 5 O Doppler angle. A represents fmax, and B represents fd.
mean flow velocity).

Doppler angles, respectively. The lower portion of the Doppler

90" Doppler angle can be determined easily by observing the
symmetric property of the Doppler spectrum, which is centered
around the zero frequency [15], [16]. Thus, the flow velocity at
90' also can be correctly estimated and is shown in Fig. 5 .
The Doppler angle and flow velocity estimation method is not
suitable for Doppler angles less than 42" in this experiment
because the critical angle between water and the wall of the
polyethylene tube is 42" [12].
The effect of the wall-thump filter on the Doppler shift spec-
trum at a large Doppler angle is schematically shown in Fig. 6.
The energy peak frequency fd of the filtered spectrum shifts to
a higher frequency; therefore, the estimated Doppler angle cal-
culated by (4) will be underestimated, and the estimated flow
velocity will be underestimated. Fig. 7 represents the Doppler
spectra of the 25.2 cm/s flow measured at 50°, 70°, and 85"
spectrum is filtered by the wall-thump filter at 85". Therefore,
the estimated Doppler angle and flow velocity are not accurate
when the energy peak of the Doppler spectrum is affected by
the wall-thump filter.
The influence of the size of the sample volume will make the
lower portion of the Doppler spectrum broaden [17]. The sam-
ple volume could be considered as a cylinder [17]. The height
of the cylinder equals the length of the sample volume, and
the width of the cylinder equals the width (beamwidth) of the
sample volume. If the sample volume is not small enough or
not much smaller than the diameter of conduit, the sample
volume will intercept with many flow lines with different veloc-
ities. Then, the received Doppler spectrum could be treated as
the result of summation of geometrically broadened line spectra
associated with each velocity. Law et al. [14]also proved that

Authorized licensed use limited to: Bursa Uludag Universitesi. Downloaded on September 03,2021 at 10:42:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
256 IEEE TRANSACTIONS O N ULTRASONICS, FERROELECTRICS, AND FREQUENCY CONTROL, VOL.
the Doppler spectrum is affected by the position of sample vol-
ume. If the sample volume is set at the center of a conduit, the
effect of changing the size of the sample volume on the vari-
ance of fd is less than 8%. Law et al. [14] concluded that fmax
and f d are affected by the position of the sample volume but
to a lesser degree by its size, and the quantification of pulsed
Doppler spectrum is feasible if the sample volume is positioned
within the central 25% of the tube.
V. CONCLUSIONS
We have demonstrated a Doppler angle and flow velocity
estimation method for constant flow measurement using only
one focused annular array transducer. The Doppler angle can
be computed from the combination of the classic Doppler ef-
fect (I) and the transverse Doppler effect (3). For pulsatile flow
measurements, the Doppler angle and flow velocity need to be
estimated in a very short time to obtain accurate results. This
problem may be resolved by using fast digital signal process-
ing techniques, which can be implemented by a customer-built
circuit to speed up the computation. Further work with more
sophisticated algorithms is needed to apply the Doppler angle
and flow velocity measurement method for pulsatile flow mea-
surements.
REFERENCES
P. Tortoli, G. Guidi, and V. L. Newhouse, “Improved blood ve-
locity estimation using the maximum Doppler frequency,” Ul-
trasound Med. B i d , vol. 21, pp. 527-532, 1995.
V. L. Newhouse, K. S. Dickerson, D. Cathignol, and J. Y.
Chapelon, “Three-dimensional vector flow estimaiton using two
transducers and spectral width,” IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferro-
elect., Freq. Contr., vol. 41, pp. 90-95.
P. Fish, Physics And Instrumentation of Diagnostzc Medical Ul-
trasound. Chichester: Wiley, 1990.
J. R. Overbeck, K. W. Beach, and D. E. Strandness, ‘Vector
Doppler: Accurate measurement of blood velocity in two dimen-
sions,’’ Ultrasound Med. Biol., vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 19-31, 1992.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Bursa Uludag Universitesi. Downloaded on September 03,2021 at 10:42:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
46, NO. 1,JANUARY 1999
M. D. Fox and M. Gardiner, “Three-dimensional Doppler ve-
locimetry of flow jets,” IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 35, pp.
834-841, Oct. 1988.
I. A. Hein, “3-D flow velocity vector estimation with a triple-
beam lens transducer experimental results,” IEEE Trans. Ul-
trason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr., vol. 44, pp. 85-89,1997.
V. L. Newhouse, D. Censor, T. Vontz, J. A. Cisneros, and B.B.
Goldberg, “Ultrasound Doppler probing of flows transverse with
respect to beam axis,” IEEE Trans. Bzomed. Eng., vol. BME-34,
pp. 779-789, Oct. 1987.
D. Censor, V. L. Newhouse, and T. Vontz, “Theory of ultra-
sound Doppler-spectra velocimetry for arbitrary beam and flow
configurations,” IEEE Duns. Biomed. Eng., vol. BME-35, pp.
740-451, Sep. 1988.
V. L. Newhouse and J. Reid, “Invariance of the Doppler band-
width with flow displacement in the illuminating field,” J .
Acoust. Soc. Amer., vol. 90, no. 5, pp. 2595-2601, 1991.
Y.Chabria and V. L. Newhouse, “Estimation of axial blood
velocity using the Doppler equation corrected for broadening,”
Ultrasound Med. Biol., vol. 23, pp. 967-968, 1997.
G. Guidi, V. L. Newhouse, and P. Tortoli, “Doppler spectrum
shape analysis based on the summation of flow-line spectra,”
IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr., vol. 42, no. 5,
pp. 907-915, 1995.
W. L. McCabe, J. C. Smith, and P. Harriot, Unit Operations
of Chemical Engineering, 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.
96-98, 1992.
J. W. Andrew and W. Junru, “Correction of intrinsic spectral
broadening errors in Doppler peak velocity measurement made
with phased sector and linear array transducer,” Ultrasound
Med. Biol., vol. 21, pp. 1928-1035, 1995.
Y. F. Law, P. A. J. Bascom, E(. W. Johnston, P. Vaitkus, and
R. S.C. Cobbold, “Experimental study of the effects of pulsed
Doppler sample volume size and position on the Doppler spec-
trum,” Ultrasonics, vol. 29, pp. 404-410, Sep. 1991.
G. P. Tortoli, G. Guidi, and P. Pignoli, “Transverse Doppler
spectral analysis for a correct interpretation of flow sonograms,”
Ultrasound Med. Biol., vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 115-121, 1993.
S.A. Jones and D. P. Gidedens, “A simulation of transit time
effects in Doppler ultrasound signals,” Ultrasound Med. Biol.,
vol. 16, pp. 607-619, 1990.
P. Tortoli, G. Guidi, and P. Pignoli, “Transverse Doppler spec-
tral analysis for a correct interpretation of flow sonograms,” Ul-
trasound Med. Biol., vol. 19, pp. 115-121, 1993.