Abstract: A system, apparatus and method are provided for measuring and removing the influence of pulsatility on contrast agent flow in a region of interest of a vascular system of a patient. Once the change of blood speed over the cardiac cycle is known (pulsatility), this influence is removed from acquired image sequence for outcome control such that “quasi-stationary”, regular flow acquisition is passed on to subsequent visualization and analysis processes. A contrast agent injector is also provided that simultaneously measures and uses ECG to inject a known contrast agent at a fixed point over the cardiac cycle or such that a known amount of contrast agent will arrive at a known time at a region of interest in the vasculature of a patient, thus controlling one of the main unwanted variables in an acquisition of blood flow sequences.

Abstract: A system (900), method (100, 200) and apparatus (600, 700, 800) are provided for analyzing a blood flow in a vascular system from a dynamic diagnostic observation sequence (101) to determine blood flow parameters (112) for further determination of filters, replay speed and finally visualization of the replayed original and filtered sequences. A first embodiment (100) extracts features of the observation and uses these features to select an appropriate model from a database of pre-determined models of vascular system of interest which have associated parameters. These parameters are varied to create an instance of the model that best matches the original observation. A second embodiment (200) visualizes a replay of the original observation (101) and the observation (101?) predicted by the model to highlight differences therebetween. A third embodiment (800) provides filtering and control of the replay speed.