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Updated: May 1, 2026
In vitro Assessment of Aortic Regurgitation Using Four-Dimensional Flow Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Published on: February 25, 2022
A methodology to detect abnormal relative wall shear stress on the full surface of the thoracic aorta using
Pim van Ooij1, Wouter V Potters, Aart J Nederveen
1Department of Radiology, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Purpose:
To compute cohort-averaged wall shear stress (WSS) maps in the thoracic aorta of patients with aortic dilatation or valvular stenosis and to detect abnormal regional WSS.
Methods:
Systolic WSS vectors, estimated from four-dimensional flow MRI data, were calculated along the thoracic aorta lumen in 10 controls, 10 patients with dilated aortas, and 10 patients with aortic valve stenosis. Three-dimensional segmentations of each aorta were coregistered by group and used to create a cohort-specific aortic geometry. The WSS vectors of each subject were interpolated onto the corresponding cohort-specific geometry to create cohort-averaged WSS maps. A Wilcoxon rank sum test was used to generate aortic P-value maps (P<0.05) representing regional relative WSS differences between groups.
Results:
Cohort-averaged systolic WSS maps and P-value maps were successfully created for all cohorts and comparisons. The dilation cohort showed significantly lower WSS on 7% of the ascending aorta surface, whereas the stenosis cohort showed significantly higher WSS on 34% of the ascending aorta surface.
Conclusions:
The findings of this study demonstrated the feasibility of generating cohort-averaged WSS maps for the visualization and identification of regionally altered WSS in the presence of disease, compared with healthy controls.
