Cardiovascular blood flow assessment

The primary purpose of the cardiovascular system is to drive, control and maintain blood flow to all parts of the body. Despite the primacy of flow, cardiovascular diagnostics still rely almost exclusively on tools focused on morphological assessment. Powerful techniques emphasizing blood flow assessment are needed. Phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-MRI) allows flow quantification in three dimensions and in three directions. Recently, our group has presented a generalization of the PC-MRI technique, which utilizes not only the signal phase to quantify the mean velocity of a voxel, as in conventional velocity mapping, but also the signal magnitude to quantify the distribution of the velocities within the voxel. We will exploit this feature in order to develop methods for the assessment of wall shear stress, turbulent stresses, and pressure loss in both laminar and turbulent cardiovascular blood flow. Validation of these tools will be performed in phantom studies by comparison with laser Doppler anemometry and computational fluid dynamics simulations, in addition to in-vivo studies. The techniques developed thereby will initially be used to assess patients with aortic coarctation, prosthetic aortic valve, dilated cardiomyopathy, and mitral valve insufficiency.

• Staff:

Jonantan Eriksson , MSc				Linköping University
Sven Petersson , MSc				Linköping University
Petter Dyverfeldt , MSc				Linköping University
John-Peder Escobar Kvitting , MD PhD				Linköping University,Stanford University
Carljohan Carlhäll , MD PhD				Linköping University
Ann Bolger , MD				University of California
Toste Länne , MD PhD				Linköping University
Matts Karlsson , PhD				Linköping University
Jan Engvall , MD PhD				Linköping University
Tino Ebbers , PhD		Principle investigator		Linköping University

• Former Staff:

• Project Description:

More information can be found at www.liu.se/cmr.