Abstract:
Carotid to femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV) is
considered as the gold standard of arterial stiffness. We
hypothesize that local pulse wave velocity (LPWV) may be a
close surrogate of the cfPWV. Current method of measuring
cfPWV is intrusive, inconvenient and requires manual
measurement of carotid-femoral distance. While other
measures of arterial stiffness can be done using ultrasound
imaging, cfPWV required separate specialized equipment. In
this paper, we provide a proof of concept of possibility of
measuring LPWV on fast ultrasound frames. We used
Verasonics® Vantage-256 Research ultrasound system to
obtain longitudinal carotid frames at a frame rate of more than
750 frames per second. Diameter waveforms are obtained
from two ends of these longitudinal frames. The minute time
shift between these waveforms is used to calculate the time of
flight of the waveform from one end of the carotid to other.
The known distance between pixels on beamformed frames
are used to calculate the LPWV. Measurements for five
human volunteers were obtained which were found to
statistically equal to the cfPWV measured using
SphygmoCor.
