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Published on: December 2, 2014
Agreement between methods of measurement of mean aortic wall thickness by MRI
Eric B Rosero1, Ronald M Peshock, Amit Khera
1Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas Texas 75390-9157, USA. eric.rosero@utsouthwestern.edu
Purpose:
To assess the agreement between three methods of calculation of mean aortic wall thickness (MAWT) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Materials And Methods:
High-resolution MRI of the infrarenal abdominal aorta was performed on 70 subjects with a history of coronary artery disease who were part of a multi-ethnic population-based sample. MAWT was calculated as the mean distance between the adventitial and luminal aortic boundaries using three different methods: average distance at four standard positions (AWT-4P), average distance at 100 automated positions (AWT-100P), and using a mathematical computation derived from the total vessel and luminal areas (AWT-VA). Bland-Altman plots and Passing-Bablok regression analyses were used to assess agreement between methods.
Results:
Bland-Altman analyses demonstrated a positive bias of 3.02+/-7.31% between the AWT-VA and the AWT-4P methods, and of 1.76+/-6.82% between the AWT-100P and the AWT-4P methods. Passing-Bablok regression analyses demonstrated constant bias between the AWT-4P method and the other two methods. Proportional bias was, however, not evident among the three methods.
Conclusion:
MRI methods of measurement of MAWT using a limited number of positions of the aortic wall systematically underestimate the MAWT value compared with the method that calculates MAWT from the vessel areas.
