DETERMINING MITRAL STENOSIS THROUGH RADIAL ARTERIAL PULSE: A COMPUTATIONAL UNDERSTANDING

Mitral Stenosis (MS) is an abnormal condition of the heart mitral valve in which the valve orifice area is reduced leading to many complications in heart function. Noninvasive and less expensive procedures for diagnosis are not currently available. The aim of this work was to explore the use of the radial artery pulse (RAP) to diagnose MS. This paper analyzed the effect of the development and growth of MS on possible radial artery noninvasive assessment parameters. For this, MS was introduced to ex vivo by varying the orifice area to either 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5cm2 in a hybrid cardiopulmonary electrical analogous model based on clinically obtained healthy controls with an orifice area of 6cm2. Results showed that a mitral valve area less than 2cm2 significantly influenced the pulse magnitude and time parameters. A strong correlation was observed in pulse height (PH), mean pulse height (MPH), and time occurrence of the dichotic notch. This may be due to increased blood remaining in the left atrium and hence decreased stoke volume (SV). SV is proportional to arterial pulse pressure which is evident from the decrease in the PH and MPH in MS. In summary, this study provides the first evidence that MS may be diagnosed by examining peripheral pulses which thus, needs further investigation to use RAP as a noninvasive and less expensive MS diagnostic tool.