Samenvatting

Background: Endothelial dysfunction is a marker of early stages of atherosclerosis and in general of cardiovascular disease. Assessing the endothelium can be achieved non-invasively, using the flow-mediated dilatation technique.

Method: For the experiment 21 patients with an inactive cardiovascular disease were employed. Using a B-mode ultrasound with a 12MHz transducer, images of the brachial artery diameter were captured before and after induced ischemia. Images were comparatively analyzed using a manual and a semi-automatic software program.
Results: Inter-correlation coefficient for the measurement was relatively high, with a p-value of 0.855 for flow mediated dilatation, 0.856 for arterial diameter at baseline and 0.756 for the post ischemic arterial diameter, showing good reliability for the software. The coefficient of variation for flow mediated dilatation was 30.32%, a high value compared to the coefficient of variation for the baseline and pos-occlusion diameters, respectively, 4.59% and 5.78%.

Conclusion: Both techniques show acceptable consistency with the semi-automatic outperforming the manual technique in terms of reliability. However, there are indications of high measure of dispersion when it comes to measuring the flow mediated dilatation with the software.