Blood speckle imaging for the assessment of aortic valve velocity in healthy children: Reproducibility and comparison with Doppler echocardiography

INTRODUCTION: Blood speckle imaging (BSI) in paediatrics is a promising novel echocardiography technique that allows complex blood flow assessment via qualitative visualization and analysis of vorticity, energy loss and kinetic energy. However, velocity quantification using BSI has scarcely been studied in vivo. METHODOLOGY: Maximum aortic valve velocities by conventional Doppler echocardiography were compared with those derived from BSI in healthy children. BSI-derived velocities were extracted via a custom Python code. Agreement between methods was assessed using Pearson correlation and Bland-Altman analysis. Inter-observer reproducibility of BSI analysis was evaluated in a randomly selected subset. RESULTS: Seventy-seven Doppler acquisitions from 33 patients were analysed. The median age was 84 months, and maximum velocity was 1.19 m/s. Modest correlation (R = 0.53, p-value