DEVELOPMENT OF ULTRASONIC-MEASUREMENT-INTEGRATED SIMULATION SYSTEM FOR COMPLEX BLOOD FLOWS

Detailed information of the velocity and the pressure field of blood flow is essential to establish an advanced diagnosis and treatment of serious circulatory diseases. Existing medical measurement equipments do not provide complete information of the blood flow in real-time. Although ultrasonography provides dynamic state of the blood flow and blood vessel form in real-time, available information of the blood flow is limited to Doppler velocity which is the flow velocity projected in the direction of the ultrasonic beam. In this paper, we develop a new blood flow measurement system applying Ultrasonic-Measurement-Integrated (UMI) simulation, that integrates ultrasonography and numerical simulation. The UMI simulation can reproduce an actual blood flow structure by including the information of the real blood flow to a numerical simulation. A prototype of the system consists of an ultrasonic diagnostic imaging equipment, a graphics workstation and a supercomputer. The system analyzes the flow structure of descending aorta with an aneurysm in real-time, displaying the information of the real flow such as velocity vectors, streak lines and pressure distribution. In order to synchronize the timing of pulsation of the UMI simulation with that of the diagnostic images, the system automatically adjusts the phase of the flow rate waveform by using measured Doppler velocity.