Study on non-invasive assessment of arterial stiffness

Arterial stiffness is an effective parameter for monitoring sub-clinical arterial stiffness, and can tell effectively the cardioArterial health condition of human body. Elastic expansion coefficient of blood vessel (named as ETK) denotes the degree of arterial elastic expansion during systolic ejection, usually used to calculate other cardiovascular parameters as the intermediate variable. A new method is proposed to estimate directly the arteriosclerotic degree with ETK, and a non-invasive monitor for blood pressure and arterial stiffness is developed. Clinical experiment results show that the correlation coefficient between ETK and results of clinical ultrasound system is 0.76, which proves the validity of the method.