Video credits: Jacob Sturdy, image of Mme Mim used under creative commons license

The stiffness of the arterial wall has repeatedly been found to serve as an independent predictor of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Additionally, changes in the properties of the arterial walls are involved in numerous diseases such as diabetes and renal dysfunction as well as for cardiovascular issues such as strokes, heart attacks and coronary artery disease.

To date the clinical focus has been on global or average measures of arterial stiffness, however, local changes in arterial stiffness may be more sensitive indicators of disease and further might enable deeper understanding of the mechanisms that relate changes in arterial stiffness to changes in health and the progression of diseases.

ENTHRAL seeks to develop a non-invasive method for characterization of the local arterial stiffness by combining ultrasound imaging, computational modeling of the personalized fluid-structure interaction of the blood and arterial wall, and application of inverse methods to link the models and imaging data for the purpose of estimating the local arterial stiffness.

The project is a collaboration between the Silesian University of Technology, NTNU and Gliwice Municipal Hospital No 4.

For more information about the project please visit the project website or contact the project participants.

ENTHRAL is funded from the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 and is operated by the National Science Center (NCN) GRIEG programme, grant# UMO-2019/34/H/ST8/00624.

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