Ultrasonic Measurement of Change in Elasticity due to Endothelium Dependent Relaxation Response by Accurate Detection of Artery-Wall Boundary

Ross hypothesized that an endothelial dysfunction is considered to be an initial step in atherosclerosis. Endothelial cells, which release nitric oxide (NO) in response to shear stress from blood flow, have a function of relaxing smooth muscle in the media of the arterial wall. For the assessment of the endothelial function, there is a conventional method in which the change in the diameter of the brachial artery caused by flow-mediated dilation (FMD) is measured with ultrasound. However, despite the fact that the collagen-rich hard adventitia does not respond to NO, the conventional method measures the change in diameter depending on the mechanical property of the entire wall including the adventitia. Therefore, we developed a method of measuring the change in the thickness and the elasticity of the brachial artery during a cardiac cycle using the phased tracking method for the evaluation of the mechanical property of only the intima-media region. In this study, the initial positions of echoes from the lumen-intima and media-adventitia boundaries are determined using complex template matching to accurately estimate the minute change in the thickness and the elasticity of the brachial and radial arteries. The ambiguity in the determination of such boundaries was eliminated using complex template matching, and the change in elasticity measured by the proposed method was larger than the change in inner diameter obtained by the conventional method.