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- What is FloWave.US?
- How does FloWave.US work?
- What ultrasound equipment can be used with FloWave.US?
- How was FloWave.US validated?
FloWave.US is a MATLAB program for automated ultrasound blood flow analysis. FloWave.US extracts blood velocity and vessel diameter values from ultrasound screen captures, giving researchers the flexibility to use a variety of ultrasound equipment and access data to calculate numerous vascular health parameters.
FloWave.US is designed to do the following:
- Create custom video settings (UsSetup.m) to adapt to ultrasound hardware and experimental conditions.
- Measure blood velocity from the Doppler pulse wave spectrum.
- Measure vessel diameter in duplex or brightness mode (BMode.m).
- Analyze beat-to-beat alterations in blood velocity and vessel diameter.
- Calculate blood flow, shear rate, and mean blood flow per cardiac cycle.
Learn more about How to Use FloWave.US.
Although Doppler ultrasound is widely used to measure blood flow and vessel diameter, few commercial ultrasound vendors support raw data export formats needed for research applications. To circumvent this restriction, FloWave.US analyzes digital video recordings of duplex or brightness mode (B-mode) ultrasound screen captures. On-screen scales allow pixels to be calibrated and recreate the information of interest (e.g. velocity, distance, time).
We expect FloWave.US to function with data acquired from any ultrasound scanner that allows:
- Recordings of the video output signal (i.e. live screen captures).
- On-screen display of manufacturer calibrated scales.
Note, we developed FloWave.US using digital videos acquired from a General Electric LOGIQ Book e (Milwaukee, WI) ultrasound scanner. This ultrasound scanner may use features not available on all commercial systems.
We demonstrated the validity of the FloWave.US blood velocity and vessel diameter measures with a skeletal muscle ultrasound flow phantom using two commercial ultrasound scanners.
If you are interested in learning more about the development and validation of FloWave.US, please refer to our innovative methodology article in the Journal of Applied Physiology.