Measurement of Aortic Pressure Wave Velocity by 4D Image Registration

Aortic pulse wave velocity is an important diagnostic measure and has been associated with significant cardiovascular mortality. Our hypothesis is that this parameter can be measured using displacement fields obtained by registration of time-series images. This paper presents a method in which a form of the wave equation is used as a regularization term in the registration process. It is demonstrated that the method can capture the pulse wave velocity from numerical phantom images, even when noise is added to these images. It is further demonstrated that the method yields plausible results when operated on a real 4D image dataset.