Defining Coronary Flow Patterns: Comprehensive Automation of Transthoracic Doppler Coronary Blood Flow

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Physiology
• Medical Imaging Analysis
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• The coronary microcirculation (CM) is vital for heart function, but its impairment is common in disease.
• Transthoracic Doppler echocardiography is a non-invasive tool for assessing CM disease.
• Manual analysis of Doppler echocardiography is subjective and time-consuming.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a MATLAB algorithm for automated analysis of murine PW Doppler coronary flow patterns.
• To reduce intra- and inter-operator bias in Doppler echocardiography analysis.
• To decrease the time required for analyzing coronary flow parameters.

Main Methods:

• Development of a MATLAB algorithm to automatically analyze parameters from PW Doppler coronary flow patterns.
• Comparison of automated analysis with manual analysis for clinically-relevant and non-traditional parameters.
• Assessment of agreement for baseline, hyperemic conditions, and coronary flow velocity reserve (CFVR).

Main Results:

• Significant reduction in intra- and inter-observer variability using the automated algorithm.
• A 30-fold decrease in analysis time compared to manual methods.
• Good agreement between automated and manual analysis for key parameters and CFVR calculations.

Conclusions:

• The developed MATLAB algorithm provides a user-friendly and robust method for analyzing Doppler coronary flow patterns.
• Automated analysis enhances efficiency and potentially offers more insightful data compared to manual methods.
• This tool can improve the assessment of coronary microcirculation disease via Doppler echocardiography.