An insight into elasticity analysis of common carotid artery using ultrasonography

Abstract

Elastance is a distinguished marker in diagnosing various arterial diseases as studies have reported carotid artery-related diseases linked with stiffness index (β) values greater than 5. This study was to estimate elasticity of common carotid artery by measuring the diameter during systolic and diastolic phases using pixel tracing of successive frames and blood pressure. The B-mode ultrasonography video containing arterial wall motion was captured and fragmented into image frames. Each pixel on the greyscale image was converted into RGB intensity values. The diameter of the artery as well as the thickness of the wall was measured by tracing the pixel displacements from successive frames during arterial pulsation. The study was conducted on 19 subjects aged 25-40 years. The systolic and diastolic carotid artery lumen diameters and carotid intima-media thickness were calculated as 7.1 ± 0.7, 6.3 ± 0.6 and 0.5 ± 0.05 mm (mean ± standard deviation), respectively. The mean stiffness index (β), Peterson's modulus and Young's modulus of elasticity were 5.2 ± 1.1, 69 ± 15 kPa and 453 ± 99 kPa, respectively. The pixel displacements in tunica intima, tunica media and tunica adventitia were not homogeneous, due to varied macro-constituents such as endothelial tissues, smooth muscle cells, elastin lamina, fibrous tissue and micro-constituents such as collagen, fibroblast and elastin. We found that women have smaller arteries, and the stiffness increased during the systolic phase.

Fabrication, characterization and numerical validation of a novel thin-wall hydrogel vessel model for cardiovascular research based on a patient-specific stenotic carotid artery bifurcation

“…Simplified rigid and compliant artery models of healthy CCAs were compared using PIV. The results demonstrated a significantly overestimated WSS in the rigid model 42 . Therefore, these studies emphasize the importance of vascular models with physiological compliance for realistic fluid dynamic investigations and implant characterization 41 .…”

“…Ebrahimi et al reported the elastic modulus of actual cerebral arteries to range between 0.2 and 0.6 MPa in the physiological pressure range, depending on the microstructure of the vessel wall at various anatomical locations 29 . The elastic modulus of CCA in 19 patients was obtained by measuring the diameter during the systolic and diastolic phases using pixel tracing of successive frames and blood pressure in B-mode ultrasound, amounting to as 0.453 ± 0.099 MPa 42 . In our study, the elastic modulus was 0.31 ± 0.008 MPa and 0.29 ± 0.007 MPa for PVA-H and silicone, respectively, and thus lying in the lower range presented in the literature.…”

Optimized integrated design of a high-frequency medical ultrasound transducer with genetic algorithm

“…Creating a cross-sectional image of tissues using ultrasonic waves has become very common in modern medicine, due to being less expensive and risky as opposed to common imaging methods [1]. The imaging resolution of ultrasonic imaging increases with increasing working frequency of the US probe, so HF US imaging has become a new and valuable tool in applications such as skin imaging [2][3][4], eye imaging [1,5], intravascular imaging [6][7][8][9], Carotid artery imaging and elastography [10,11] and small animal imaging [12,13].…”