fat-water-phantoms-for-magnetic-resonance-imaging-validation-flexible

Fat-Water Phantoms for Magnetic Resonance Imaging Validation: A Flexible and Scalable Protocol

As new techniques are developed to image adipose tissue, methods to validate such protocols are becoming increasingly important. Phantoms, experimental ...

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Automated software improves the accuracy and reliability of blood velocity, vessel diameter, blood flow, and shear rate ultrasound measurements, but existing software offers limited flexibility to customize and validate analyses. We developed FloWave.US-open-source software to automate ultrasound blood flow analysis-and demonstrated the validity of its blood velocity (aggregate relative error, 4.32%) and vessel diameter (0.31%) measures with a skeletal muscle ultrasound flow phantom. Compared with a commercial, manual analysis software program, FloWave.US produced equivalent in vivo cardiac cycle time-averaged mean (TAMean) velocities at rest and following a 10-s muscle contraction (mean bias <1 pixel for both conditions). Automated analysis of ultrasound blood flow data was 9.8 times faster than the manual method. Finally, a case study of a lower extremity muscle contraction experiment highlighted the ability of FloWave.US to measure small fluctuations in TAMean velocity, vessel diameter, and mean blood flow at specific time points in the cardiac cycle. In summary, the collective features of our newly designed software-accuracy, reliability, reduced processing time, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility-offer advantages over existing proprietary options. Further, public distribution of FloWave.US allows researchers to easily access and customize code to adapt ultrasound blood flow analysis to a variety of vascular physiology applications.

FloWave.US: validated, open-source, and flexible software for ultrasound blood flow analysis.

Cold exposure, a known stimulant of the thermogenic effects of brown adipose tissue (BAT), is the most widely used method to study BAT physiology in adult humans. Recently, individualized cooling has been recommended to standardize the physiological cold stress applied across participants, but critical experimental details remain unclear. The purpose of this work was to develop a detailed methodology for an individualized, perception-based protocol to investigate human physiological responses to cooling. Participants were wrapped in two water-circulating blankets and fitted with skin temperature probes to estimate BAT activity and peripheral vasoconstriction. We created a thermoesthesia graphical user interface (tGUI) to continuously record the subject's perception of cooling and shivering status during the cooling protocol. The protocol began with a 15 min thermoneutral phase followed by a series of 10 min cooling phases and concluded when sustained shivering (>1 min duration) occurred. Researchers used perception of cooling feedback (tGUI ratings) to manually adjust and personalize the water temperature at each cooling phase. Blanket water temperatures were recorded continuously during the protocol. Twelve volunteers (ages: 26.2 ± 1.4 years; 25% female) completed a feasibility study to evaluate the proposed protocol. Water temperature, perception of cooling, and shivering varied considerably across participants in response to cooling. Mean clavicle skin temperature, a surrogate measure of BAT activity, decreased (-0.99°C, 95% CI: -1.7 to -0.25°C,  = 0.16) after the cooling protocol, but an increase in supraclavicular skin temperature was observed in 4 participants. A strong positive correlation was also found between thermoesthesia and peripheral vasoconstriction (ρ = 0.84,  < 0.001). The proposed individualized, perception-based protocol therefore has potential to investigate the physiological responses to cold stress applied across populations with varying age, sex, body composition, and cold sensitivity characteristics.

Article	Year
FloWave.US: validated, open-source, and flexible software for ultrasound blood flow analysis. Journal of applied physiology (Bethesda, Md. : 1985)\| PubMed ID: 27516540	2016
An Individualized, Perception-Based Protocol to Investigate Human Physiological Responses to Cooling. Frontiers in physiology\| PubMed ID: 29593558	2018

Crystal L. Coolbaugh

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