Exploration of age-related hemodynamic and mechanical changes in the human thoracic aorta using an atlas based approach

Understanding the hemodynamic involvement in a vascular pathology requires inter-subject comparisons that are not straightforward due to variability in terms of aorta morphology. Hemodynamic atlases can facilitate detection of intra-group characteristics. We propose here a workflow to create a hemodynamic atlas using 4D Flow MRI. In addition, we propose to investigate the aorta wall stiffness using non-rigid image registration and inverse mechanical modeling. This type of analysis is expected to improve pathophysiological understanding of vascular disease, by enabling the investigation of potential correlations between hemodynamic and wall mechanical properties at each point of the aorta.