BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Systemic and local coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factors participate in atherogenesis. The role of wall shear stress, a major local risk factor, remains to be elucidated. METHODS Two hundred thirty-four subjects were carefully characterized for the presence of hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes mellitus, obesity, and cigarette smoking and were divided into low- ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Carotid artery plaques with vulnerable plaque components are related to a higher risk of cerebrovascular accidents. It is unknown which factors drive vulnerable plaque development. Shear stress, the frictional force of blood at the vessel wall, is known to influence plaque formation. We evaluated the association between shear stress and plaque components (intraplaque haemorr...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Previous studies have reported that carotid atherosclerosis frequently can be seen in coronary artery disease (CAD) patients. This study sought to determine the prevalence of compositional features in subclinical carotid atherosclerosis by MRI in CAD patients. METHODS Ninety-six subjects with suspected CAD but free of neurological symptoms underwent coronary CT angiogra...

Introduction: Arterial stiffness is an important predictor of cardiovascular risk. Several indices have been  introduced to estimate the arterial stiffness based on the changes in the brachial blood pressure. Since the  substitution  of  the  blood  pressure  changes  in  the  central  arteries  such  as  carotid  with  the  blood  pressure  changes in the brachial results in error in the blood...

PURPOSE Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) can characterize carotid atherosclerosis. The purpose of this study is to evaluate reader agreement of carotid atherosclerotic lesion types by CMR. METHODS Carotid arteries of 34 patients (29 men, 5 women; mean age, 53 years) were imaged on a 1.5-T scanner. Images with 4 contrast weightings (T1, T2, proton density, and 3-dimensional time-of-flig...

The cervical course of the internal carotid artery is almost straight in contrast to the intracranial portions which are highly tortuous. The incidence of variations in the cervical course of the internal carotid artery of the population is approximately 10-40 percent. In this case report, a 76-year-old female patient with a pulsatile mass at the posterior oropharyngeal wall and anterior neck w...

We investigated the effects of sequential and prolonged exposure to high and low wall shear stress on arterial remodeling using a rabbit arteriovenous fistula (AVF) model. Blood flow was increased by approximately 17-fold to 20-fold when the AVF was open, and returned to normal when the AVF was occluded. Repeated opening and closing of the AVF resulted in sequential exposure of the artery to hi...

A new approach is proposed for the automatic detection of the near-end and far-end intima and adventitia inner boundaries in ultrasound images of the common carotid artery. This method uses the instantaneous coefficient of variation edge detector, fuzzy classification of edges, several discriminating features of the carotid wall boundaries and dynamic programming. The carotid wall boundaries ar...

This work developed a three-dimensional (3D) diffusion-prepared segmented steady-steady free precession (DP-SSFP) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) sequence for black-blood (BB) thoracic aortic and carotid wall visualization. In 14 healthy volunteers, BB CMR of the thoracic aorta (n = 7) and carotid arteries (n = 7) was performed over 12 cm and 3 cm of transversal coverage, respectively, ...

Background and Purpose The relation between arterial wall (intimal-medial) thickness and lumen narrowing is complex and has previously been studied predominantly at autopsy. B-mode ultrasound affords the opportunity to visualize both wall and lumen of the extracranial carotid arteries in vivo. Several studies have quantified the relation of various independent variables to wall thickness of car...