Efficient numerical reconstruction of color Doppler images of mitral regurgitation in vitro

Abstract

2D color Doppler imaging (CDI) is currently the clinical standard to assess the mitral regurgitation (MR) severity. However, due to technical and operational limitations, commonly used diagnostic approaches suffer from known shortcomings: inadequate reliability, poor reproducibility and heavy user-dependency. Aiming at improving the quality of medical assessment, an efficient numerical reconstruction of color Doppler images is presented. With help of a graphical user interface (GUI), virtual CDI of different system configurations and imaging parameters was conveniently generated in a reasonable time span. The numerical reconstruction was based on experimental results and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of a flow chamber with different orifices simulating variations of mitral insufficiency. This platform can be used to validate, evaluate and further develop existing diagnostic approaches of MR.