Research On The Relationship Between The Vascular Elasticity And Pulse Waveform

Vascular lesions have been universally regarded as the basis of incidence of various cardiovascular disease with the increasing patients with cardiovascular diseases and the development of cardiovascular disease research. Moreover, the change of vascular elasticity (VE) is earlier than the change of vascular structure, and artery elastic function is not only the major determinant of systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and pulse pressure (PP), but also reflects the arterial endothelial function status to a certain degree. Therefore it has great significance to detect VE.Currently, there are several methods to access VE such as angiography, ultrasonic technology, pulse wave velocity (PWV), analysis of the oscillometric cuff signal (AOCS), applanation tonometry (AT), nuclear magnetic resonance imaging(MRI) and pulse wave analysis, etc. Among them, ultrasonic technology plays an important role in measurement of arterial elasticity because of its universality, maneuverability, non-invasive characteristic and repeatability etc. in application. At present, there are more than ten indexes reflecting VE, some of which are related, such as pulse waveform characteristic quantity (K), pulse wave velocity (PWV), augmentation index (AIX) and stiffness index (β) etc.Pulse wave consists of systolic pressure wave and ascular elasticity damped wave. Abundant scientific researches and medical practices discover that pulse wave contains much rich knowledge on the physiological and pathological cardiovascular system. The FFT analysis for pulse waveform, which is represented by all the frequency component of pulse wave signal so that the information will not lost and will be helpful to identification and analysis of the subtle variation of primary signal, is a classic way in modern information processing.Age is an independent risk factor of artery vascular impairment. Increase of age leads to decrease of arterial elasticity and damage of endothelium-dependent vasodilative function . This study proposed a method using the value of amplitude of FFT frequency to evaluate the vascular elasticity (VE). Although personally different features of subject and accidentalia in the measurements was existing, the result of the experiment reflected the relationship between VE and pulse waveform comparatively well, and the relationship between VE and age indirectly. The value of amplitude of FFT frequency could reflect the subtle variation of the pulse waveform significantly compared with the K value evaluating the VE reported in the published literature. This method showed potential in terms of non-invasive VE detecting and put forward a new and doable suggestion for the study of VE.