Resistivity Index Mapping in Kidney Based on Ultrasensitive Pulsed-Wave Doppler and Automatic Spectrogram Envelope Detection

In recent years, ultrasensitive Pulsed-Wave Doppler (uPWD) ultrasound (US) has emerged as an alternative imaging approach for microcirculation imaging and as a complementary tool to other imaging modalities, such as positron emission tomography (PET). uPWD is based on the acquisition of a large set of highly spatiotemporally coherent frames, which allows high-quality images of a wide field of view to be obtained. In addition, these acquired frames allow calculation of the resistivity index (RI) of the pulsatile flow detected over the entire field of view, which is of great interest to clinicians, for example, in monitoring the transplanted kidney course. This work aims to develop and evaluate a method to automatically obtain an RI map of the kidney based on the uPWD approach. The effect of time gain compensation (TGC) on the visualization of vascularization and aliasing on the blood flow frequency response, was also assessed. A pilot study conducted in patients referred for renal transplant Doppler examination showed that the proposed method provided relative errors of about 15% for RI measurements with respect to conventional pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler.