Augmenting a Wireless Portable Ultrasound Imaging with a real-time Hemodynamics Solver

Abstract

The core of our novel method and system consists of augmenting the standard features of an ultrasound probe by adding functional information from real-time hemodynamic flow computation. It is well known that the quality of ultrasound (US) imaging is very much operator dependent. Our hypothesis is that combining real-time Navier-Stokes simulation with US imaging may reveal inconsistency in mass conservation along the vascular structure that shows when the US acquisition needs to be redone. Augmenting a light wireless US imaging device with robust flow simulation may reveal itself to be a valuable tool to improve the quality of diagnostic with shear stress indicators. In this paper, we describe the main concept of our cyber-physical system to augment an US probe. However robust simulation of Navier-Stokes flow in real time remains a challenging problem. The focus of this paper is on the description and efficiency results of a new parallel domain decomposition algorithm to deliver that level of performance.