Accurate evaluation of viscoelasticity of radial artery wall during flow-mediated dilation in ultrasound measurement

In our previous study, the viscoelasticity of the radial artery wall was estimated to diagnose endothelial dysfunction using a high-frequency (22MHz) ultrasound device. In the present study, we employed a commercial ultrasound device (7.5MHz) and estimated the viscoelasticity using arterial pressure and diameter, both of which were measured at the same position. In a phantom experiment, the proposed method successfully estimated the elasticity and viscosity of the phantom with errors of 1.8 and 30.3%, respectively. In an in vivo measurement, the transient change in the viscoelasticity was measured for three healthy subjects during flow-mediated dilation (FMD). The proposed method revealed the softening of the arterial wall originating from the FMD reaction within 100 s after avascularization. These results indicate the high performance of the proposed method in evaluating vascular endothelial function just after avascularization, where the function is difficult to be estimated by a conventional FMD measurement. © 2016 The Japan Society of Applied Physics