Analysis of Doppler Ultrasound Outflow Profiles for the Detection of changes in Cardiac Function

Detecting changes in the contractility of the heart muscle, especially in the presence of coronary artery disease, is an important medical task. From isolated myocytes, it was suggested that chronic ischemia decreases but prolongs contraction. Additionally, severe aortic stenosis shows higher but often prolonged outflow velocities. From this, we hypothesize that there is a correlation between the morphology of the aortic outflow velocity profile and myocardial function. To test this hypothesis, we (semi-) automatically analyzed continuous wave Doppler aortic outflow traces from 112 individuals. The traces were segmented and a set of morphology features were extracted. Areas under ROC curve were used as a measure of quality of each feature for detecting changes in cardiac function related to coronary artery disease. Signal analysis has shown that the probabilistic distributions of the various features are different for normal individuals and patients with ongoing disease. This result shows that aortic outflow profiles provide information on cardiac function and that the presented signal analysis and feature extraction method might be used to provide additional diagnostic information in the clinical management of coronary artery disease.