Morphological Analysis of in Vivo Velocity Field in the Alteration of the Vasomotor Tone

Abstract

Vessel wall remodeling is involved in atherogenesis and in several important vascular diseases affecting mainly aged and prosthetic implanted patients. This adaptive response to pathological states in arterial hemodynamics strongly suggests that flow-derived stresses act as mechanical stimuli to the release of endothelium-derived vasoactive factors, leading to vascular alterations. As the correlation of intimal hyperplasia (IH) with blood flow alterations in arteries has been shown to be significant, and as it is well-known that clinical procedures carry a substantial risk of development of vascular disease, the relevance of local hemodynamics must be investigated to describe changes in compliance matching in prosthetic applications. The aim of our research is to investigate the use of principal components analysis, together with varimax rotation, in the individuation process of morphological characteristics of real time ultrasound in in vivo recordings of blood flow velocities, as provided by two different carotid perivascular manipulations. This would be of use in the clinical assessment of atherogenesis, hypertension, prosthetic replacement or more in general in all applications in which vascular tone may be impaired. Data recordings refer to previous animal experiments where the Moncada model was investigated by means of an ultrasound profilometer. The present study confirms the feasibility of the proposed analysis to follow vascular pathology evolution, distiguishing between an in progress and a static situation.