Rw. Stadler et al., THE APPLICATION OF ECHO-TRACKING METHODS TO ENDOTHELIUM-DEPENDENT VASOREACTIVITY AND ARTERIAL COMPLIANCE MEASUREMENTS, Ultrasound in medicine & biology, 22(1), 1996, pp. 35-42
Citations number
38
Categorie Soggetti
Radiology,Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging",Acoustics
Measurements of endothelium-dependent vasoreactivity and arterial comp
liance are important metrics of vascular pathophysiology which may be
used for the development and evaluation of therapeutic methods, The te
chnique of ultrasonic echo tracking is applicable to measurements of e
ndothelium-dependent vasoreactivity and arterial compliance, To evalua
te the application of echo tracking to these measurements, we construc
ted a system based upon analog-to-digital conversion and storage of th
e radio frequency (RF) ultrasound signals, Off-line analysis of the RF
data with various echo-tracking algorithms demonstrated two potential
sources of error: tracking drift and RF transition regions, The track
ing drift resulted from the slow accumulation of tracking error, The R
F transition regions were associated with disparate motions of neighbo
ring reflectors or the insonation of a new series of tissue layers, As
a result of these sources of error, the application of echo tracking
to endothelium-dependent vasoreactivity measurements is unlikely to ou
tperform duplex ultrasound methods, The application of echo tracking t
o arterial compliance measurements via the arterial pressure/diameter
relationship may produce variable results due to RF transition regions
. Finally, the application of echo tracking to arterial compliance mea
surements via the pulse wave velocity is relatively insensitive to the
se sources of error because the pulse-wave velocity measurement depend
s upon the timing of the peak arterial distension, not on the absolute
value of the distension.