NONINVASIVE DETERMINATION OF PROPAGATION PARAMETERS IN THE CAROTID ARTERY

Abstract

Few studies are interested in the noninvasive determination of propagation parameters. Reflected waves can be used as an intelligent tool for therapeutic measures. The amplitude and arrival time of reflected wave play an interesting role in investigating cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, this study aims to implement a method based on cepstral analysis for noninvasive decomposition of the incident and reflected waves and determination of local propagation parameters. The cepstral analysis is applied to the blood velocity, which is measured by using phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PCMR) in 20 subjects. The determination of propagation parameters: arrival time, attenuation coefficient, reflection amplitude, and reflection coefficient is based on a mathematical model developed in the previous work. To evaluate the precision of the proposed approach, we focused on the effect of age. In addition, we intended to compare the obtained results to those obtained by the wave intensity analysis (WIA) method. A statistical test analysis was conducted to establish the relationship between the propagation parameters and the age. Our experimental results showed that there is no significant difference in terms of propagation parameters with age ([Formula: see text]). Our experimental results correlated with reference values reported in previous studies conducted on the internal arterial carotid. The propagate parameters obtained by the proposed method varied slightly with age. Moreover, the reflection coefficient detected using our proposed method was close to that detected using WIA. We can conclude that the technique described in this paper offers a promising and efficient approach to separating measured velocity waveforms into their incident and reflected components noninvasively.