Sahani Ashish Kumar, Shah Malay Ilesh, Radhakrishnan Ravikumar, Joseph Jayaraj, Sivaprakasam Mohanasankar
IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst. 2016 Feb;10(1):200-8. doi: 10.1109/TBCAS.2015.2394468. Epub 2015 Mar 11.
Arterial stiffness (AS) has been shown to be an important marker for risk assessment of cardiovascular events. Local arterial stiffness (LAS) is conventionally measured by evaluating arterial distensibility at particular arterial sites through ultrasound imaging systems. Regional arterial stiffness (RAS) is generally obtained by evaluating carotid to femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV) through tonometric devices. RAS has a better prognostic value than LAS and cfPWV is considered as the gold standard of AS. Over the past few years our group has been developing ARTerial Stiffness Evaluation for Non-Invasive Screening (ARTSENS), an inexpensive and portable device to measure the LAS. It uses a single element ultrasound transducer to obtain A-Mode frames from the desired artery and is fully automated to enable a non-expert to perform measurements. In this work, we report an extension of ARTSENS to enable measurement of cfPWV that now makes it the only fully automatic device that can measure both LAS and RAS. In this paper, we provide a general review of the ARTSENS and compare it with other state-of-the-art AS measurement systems. cfPWV measurement using ARTSENS was cross-validated against SphygmoCor by successive measurements with both devices on 41 human subjects and excellent agreement between both devices was demonstrated (Coefficient of determination and, limits of agreement m/s). The inter-device correlation between ARTSENS and SphygmoCor was found to be better than other similar studies reported in the literature.
动脉僵硬度（AS）已被证明是心血管事件风险评估的重要指标。传统上，局部动脉僵硬度（LAS）是通过超声成像系统评估特定动脉部位的动脉扩张性来测量的。区域动脉僵硬度（RAS）通常是通过张力测量装置评估颈动脉至股动脉脉搏波速度（cfPWV）来获得的。RAS比LAS具有更好的预后价值，并且cfPWV被视为AS的金标准。在过去的几年里，我们团队一直在开发用于无创筛查的动脉僵硬度评估（ARTSENS），这是一种用于测量LAS的廉价且便携的设备。它使用单个超声换能器从目标动脉获取A模式帧，并且完全自动化，使非专业人员也能进行测量。在这项工作中，我们报告了ARTSENS的扩展，使其能够测量cfPWV，这使得它成为唯一能够同时测量LAS和RAS的全自动设备。在本文中，我们对ARTSENS进行了全面综述，并将其与其他最先进的AS测量系统进行了比较。使用ARTSENS测量cfPWV与SphygmoCor进行了交叉验证，在41名人类受试者身上同时使用这两种设备进行连续测量，结果表明两种设备之间具有极好的一致性（决定系数和一致性界限m/s）。发现ARTSENS与SphygmoCor之间的设备间相关性优于文献中报道的其他类似研究。
