Method And Apparatus For Automated Ultrasonic Doppler Angle And Flow Velocity Estimation

A method of determining a Doppler angle for Doppler blood velocimetry in a volume of a body part of a subject, the method comprising the steps of:

• a receiving step of receiving electrical signals from a two dimensional array of ultrasound transducers, the signals being representative of ultrasound energy reflected from the body part of the subject, the ultrasound energy having been radiated by the two dimensional array;
• a computation step of computing the Doppler power in a predetermined frequency band received from predetermined locations in the volume;
• a generating step of generating a first three dimensional array wherein each cell of the array contains the Doppler power value received from a location in the volume with a predefined relationship between the location and the position of t e cell n the array;
• a mapping step of generating a second three dimensional array wherein each cell of the second array contains a binary bit representing whether a the value in the corresponding cell of the first three dimensional array is above a threshold or not;
• an identification step of identifying a group of adjoining cells that contain the binary bit representing values above the threshold, in each two dimensional array forming the second three dimensional array;
• a calculation step of calculating the three dimensional coordinates of the centroid of the area covered by each group in each of the two dimensional arrays;
• and
• an angle calculation step of calculating the angle between a first line joining two centroids nearest to each other in the two adjacent two dimensional arrays and a second line passing through one of the two centroids, the line being parallel to the radiated ultrasound.