Estimation of the viscoelastic properties of vessel walls using a computational model and Doppler ultrasound

Human arteries affected by atherosclerosis are characterized by altered wall viscoelastic properties. The possibility of noninvasively assessing arterial viscoelasticity in vivo would significantly contribute to the early diagnosis and prevention of this disease. This paper presents a noniterative t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physics in medicine & biology Vol. 55; no. 12; p. 3557
Main Authors: Balocco, Simone, Basset, Olivier, Courbebaisse, Guy, Boni, Enrico, Frangi, Alejandro F, Tortoli, Piero, Cachard, Christian
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: England 21.06.2010
Subjects:
Blood Vessels - diagnostic imaging
Blood Vessels - physiology
Computational Biology
Computer Simulation
Elasticity
Humans
Models, Biological
Phantoms, Imaging
Regional Blood Flow
Ultrasonography, Doppler
Viscosity
ISSN:1361-6560, 1361-6560
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:Human arteries affected by atherosclerosis are characterized by altered wall viscoelastic properties. The possibility of noninvasively assessing arterial viscoelasticity in vivo would significantly contribute to the early diagnosis and prevention of this disease. This paper presents a noniterative technique to estimate the viscoelastic parameters of a vascular wall Zener model. The approach requires the simultaneous measurement of flow variations and wall displacements, which can be provided by suitable ultrasound Doppler instruments. Viscoelastic parameters are estimated by fitting the theoretical constitutive equations to the experimental measurements using an ARMA parameter approach. The accuracy and sensitivity of the proposed method are tested using reference data generated by numerical simulations of arterial pulsation in which the physiological conditions and the viscoelastic parameters of the model can be suitably varied. The estimated values quantitatively agree with the reference values, showing that the only parameter affected by changing the physiological conditions is viscosity, whose relative error was about 27% even when a poor signal-to-noise ratio is simulated. Finally, the feasibility of the method is illustrated through three measurements made at different flow regimes on a cylindrical vessel phantom, yielding a parameter mean estimation error of 25%.
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ISSN:1361-6560
1361-6560
DOI:10.1088/0031-9155/55/12/019