Pulse Wave Velocity in Patients with Bicuspid Aortic Valve and Normal Controls: Discriminatory Ability Among Multiple Analysis Techniques

Thananya Boonyasirinant¹, Randolph M. Setser¹, Prabhakar Raijiah², Milind Y. Desai, Scott D. Flamm¹

Aortic compliance has become a surrogate marker, however this has been little studied with velocity-encoded MRI in bicuspid aortic valve (BAV). While pulse wave velocity (PWV) is a powerful assessment tool, there are multiple techniques to assess the time delay of the velocity waveform. This study demonstrated increased PWV in BAV compared to controls with all 3 PWV analysis techniques. However, the results emphasize the different discriminatory abilities of the 3 PWV analysis techniques with technique 1 (arrival of the foot measured as the interception of steep early systolic slope and baseline) providing the greatest AUC by ROC analysis.