Keywords:
Cardiovascular system, Vascular, MR-Angiography, Technical aspects
Authors:
P. Talarczyk, J. Weir-McCall, L. Brown, J. Summersgill, M. Bonnici-Mallia, S. C. Chin, F. khan, G. Houston; Dundee/UK
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2018/C-2403
Aims and objectives
Arteriosclerosis is hardening and thickening of the arteries causing reduced dampening of the blood pressure fluctuations throughout the cardiac cycle.
As a result,
the systolic blood pressure is elevated and perfusion during diastole is reduced.
This causes end organ damage affecting primarily heart,
brain and kidneys.
Reduced elasticity increases load on the heart leading to left ventricular hypertrophy.
Carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) reflects arterial stiffness and has been proven to correlate well with cardiovascular mortality and morbidity.
It is a good predictor in evaluation of future cardiovascular events risk factors.
PWV is commonly measured by detecting a pressure wave at the carotid and femoral artery,
estimating arterial distance travelled by the wave with external measurement device and documenting time interval between detections.
PWV is defined as D/t where D is the distance travelled by the wave and t is the time of wave propagation.
PWV formulas include common carotid artery to femoral artery distance multiplied by 0.8 and carotid to femoral distance minus suprasternal notch to carotid distance123.
The external measurement is widely used but there are significant differences in measurement methods between the centres and in population specific reference values4.
Whole body magnetic resonance angiography (WB-MRA) Fig. 3 demonstrates true arterial distance between pressure measurement points and is a gold standard for arterial path length.
It allows accurate PWV calculation.
Using a large population with WB-MRA and routinely documented metrics an arterial distance formula based on these metrics alone can be generated.
The purpose of this study is to investigate whether a distance formula derived from WB-MRA reduces intercentre differences in PWV.