Evaluation of Different Techniques for Measuring Pulse Wave Velocity Using 3 Tesla MRI

Elsayed H. Ibrahim¹, Kevin R. Johnson¹, Jean M. Shaffer¹, Richard D. White¹

Arterial stiffness can be noninvasively estimated by measuring pulse wave velocity(PWV) from velocity-encoded MR images using different methods: transit-time(TT), flow-area(QA), and cross-correlation(XC). However, the reproducibility and comparison of these different techniques have not yet been studied in a large diverse group of patients for relative durability and reproducibility, especially at 3T field. In this work, the aortic PWV is measured in 50 patients, representing a wide range of cardiovascular conditions, to assess inter-observer, intra-observer, inter-scan, and inter-method variabilities using 3T MRI. The TT method resulted in the most-reproducible measurements and required the shortest processing-time, followed by XC and QA.