Study of the effects of age and body mass index on the carotid wall vibration: Extraction methodology and analysis

This study aims to non-invasively extract the vibrations of the carotid wall and evaluate the changes in the carotid artery wall caused by age and obesity. Such evaluation can increase the possibility of detecting wall stiffness and atherosclerosis in its early stage. In this study, a novel method that uses a phase-tracking method based on the continuous wavelet transform calculates the carotid wall motion from the ultrasound radio frequency signals. To extract the high-frequency components of the wall motion, wall vibration, the empirical mode decomposition was then used. The posterior wall (intima-media) motion and vibration were extracted for 54 healthy volunteers (mean age: 33.87 ± 14.73 years), including 13 overweight subjects (body mass index > 25) and 14 female participants using their radio frequency signals. The results showed that the dominant frequency of the wall vibration correlates with age (r = –0.5887, p < 0.001) and body mass index (r = –0.4838, p < 0.001). The quantitative analysis further demonstrated that the dominant frequency of the vibration in the radial direction of the carotid wall decreases by age and is lower in overweight subjects. Besides, the peak-to-peak amplitude of the wall vibration showed significant correlations with age (r = –0.5456, p < 0.001) and body mass index (r = –0.5821, p < 0.001). The peak-to-peak amplitude also decreases by age and is lower in overweight subjects. However, there were...
Source: Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part H: Journal of Engineering in Medicine - Category: Biomedical Engineering Authors: Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research