Feasibility of pulse wave velocity measurement in pulmonary arteries from phase-resolved functional lung MRI

Phase-resolved functional lung (PREFUL) MRI-derived flow cycles are used to calculate time differences in blood flow and thus mean velocity between the truncus pulmonalis and voxels located in main pulmonary arteries. Two U-Net-based convolutional neural networks are used to identify voxels to include in the analysis. In 26 patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) the resulting pulmonary artery pulse wave velocity (paPWV) values are reproducible after two weeks. The measured velocities in COPD patients and in 30 healthy subjects are in a physiologically plausible range compared to invasive measurements.