For getting reliable measurements of the arteries state, by a non-invasive via, to prevent dangerous vascular events (heart attacks, atheromas, cerebral strokes, etc.), ultrasonic tools must be used. Nevertheless, the conventional echographic equipment gives a poor spatial resolution (several hundreds of micron), clearly insufficient to study the arterial elastic properties. In this paper, the possibility of performing a spectral study of ultrasonic echoes coming from arterial walls, is analyzed, with the aim of seeing viability of achieving a much better estimation of the arterial elasticity, respecting to previous ultrasonic tools proposed with this aim. A comparison will be made between preliminary results obtained with our new proposal and with the better classical procedure for elastic measurements: the cross-correlation based techniques. Results suggest that our hypothesis can constitute a promising via to attain a non-invasive diagnostic of the arterial state with high resolution, by the measurement of its Young's elastic modulus.
A. Ramos, I. Bazán, G. Balay, C. Negreira, J. Brum
IEEE Xplore, July 2017,