Quantitative assessment of the artery dilation measurements with an arterial phantom

The arterial wall motion (AWM) technique, based on the use of tissue Doppler imaging, provides quantitative measurements of the artery dilations over the cardiac cycles. We present the technical validation of the geometrical model used in AWM. The experiments are based on a phantom simulating arterial pulsation and aim at assessing the variability and reproducibility of the AWM measurements over time and space, as well as perform comparisons vs. the reference "wall tracking" technique. The results show that the spatial and temporal AWM measurements exhibit satisfactory stability (normalized standard deviation equal to 2.46%), and that the peak dilation measurements provided by AWM are very close to those obtained by the "wall tracking" technique (normalized difference equal to 5.36%)