High frame rate ultrasound imaging of human carotid artery dynamics

The carotid artery (CA) is one of the main arteries of interest to cardiovascular research, because of the clinical relevance of CA plaques as culprits of stroke and the accessibility of the CA for cardiovascular health screening. Viscoelastic properties of the arterial wall and of possible lesions within are key components for clinical evaluation of the CA. These viscoelastic properties can be assessed by monitoring the interaction of the wall with a passing arterial pulse wave using ultrasound (US) imaging. The local wall motion (position, velocity, and acceleration) may contain high frequency components and hence a full understanding of tissue mechanics in the CA requires very high frame rate imaging. In this paper we present a high density motion analysis of the CA based on an arterial pulse wave imaged with 2.5 up to 35 kHz frame rate US imaging.