Electronic Phantom for Arterial Wall Movement and Blood Flow

The development of new ultrasound methods and instrumentations for the investigation of arterial mechanics and blood flow dynamics requires the use of phantoms and flow-rigs capable of precisely reproducing the involved phenomena. Unfortunately, these tools are often cumbersome, inaccurate and, most of all, the ground-truth of the reproduced features is not perfectly known. In this work we propose an embedded electronic phantom (EEP) that simultaneously emulates the wall movement and the blood flow in an artery. The EEP synthesizes in real-time the ultrasound RF signal that mimics the echo backscattered by the artery when impinged by ultrasound bursts, and feeds it to the scanner probe through an acoustic coupling. All the features of the vessel wall and flow are programmable and perfectly known to the user. In the presented experiments the EEP, connected to the ULA-OP 64 research echograph, emulates in real-time a 5 mm diameter vessel with 10% distension and parabolic blood flow pulsing at 72 bpm.