NON-INVASIVE ULTRASONIC MEASUREMENT OF REGIONAL AND LOCAL PULSE-WAVE VELOCITY IN MICE.
Williams R, Needles A, Cherin E, Zhou YQ, Henkelman RM, Adamson SL, Foster FS.
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Ultrasound Med Biol. 2007 Jun 8; [Epub ahead of print]

• > Mouse models of human disease are increasingly used to study the nature of cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis. The pulse wave velocity (PWV) provides an indirect measure of arterial stiffness and can be useful for characterizing disease progression. In this study, the PWV was measured non-invasively in the left common carotid artery of seven young mice using two image-guided approaches: a regional transit-time (TT) method and a local flow-area (QA) method. The QA approach measures the cross-sectional area and volume flow through the vessel using high frame-rate retrospective colour flow imaging. The QA method was found to correlate well with the TT method (r(2) = 0.80, p < 0.001). The mean difference between methods was 0.05 +/- 0.21 m/s. This study demonstrates the feasibility of measuring both regional and local PWV in mice using image-based high-frequency ultrasound (Vevo 770, VisualSonics) methodologies.
  
  Note: This paper uses the Vevo 770 micro-ultrasound system for all its imaging. Please note that the "Colorized EKV" mentioned in this paper is not a commercially available application at the current time.