A New Noninvasive Method for Determining the Local (True) Wave Speed: Application to Internal Carotid Artery

Local wave speed plays an interesting role in investigating cardiovascular diseases and arterial wall stiffness. The aim of this study was to implement a novel method based on cepstral analysis for noninvasive determination of local wave speed in the carotid artery. To show the precision of the proposed method, we specially focused on the effect of age. In addition, we intended to compare the obtained results to those obtained by the foot-to-foot method. Our method consists in measuring the instantaneous blood velocity in the internal carotid by using phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging in 20 healthy subjects distributed as follows: 10 young subjects aged between 22 and 41 years, and 10 old subjects aged between 50 and 86 years. The cepstral analysis was used to determine the arrival time of the reflection wave and the wave speed in the carotid artery. A statistical test analysis was conducted in order to establish the relation between the wave speed and the age in the sample under investigation. Our main finding was that there was a high significant difference between the two groups forming the studied sample ([Formula: see text]). In terms of the internal carotid arterial branch, our experimental results were in total agreement with reference values by the invasive method reported in the literature. Moreover, the wave speed detected using our method correlated with that detected using foot-to-foot analysis ([Formula: see text], [Formula: see text]). We can conclude that the new technique described in this paper offers a promising, convenient and efficient method to measure wave speed noninvasively.