| Description |
Peripheral artery disease (PAD) affects millions of patients in the USA, and effective diagnosis and management of PAD is a major clinical goal. One promising avenue of research towards the goal is through functional MRI, which provides non-invasive measurement of tissue oxygenation. For a group of healthy and PAD subjects, we performed functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans immediately after plantar flexion, with variable loads, to monitor muscle oxygenation (pO2) during the exercise recovery. In the project, I built a mathematical model that characterizes the kinetics of blood oxygen in calf muscle during exercise recovery, based on MR physics, and implemented the model using Matlab. In conjunction, parameters were chosen that described the data (i.e. initial value or minimum), called data parameter analysis, which were compared amongst the subjects. The Matlab grograms included the oxygen kinetic model and a curve-fitting algorithm driven by least-square optimization technique as well as the data parameter analysis. With the programs. we processed the functional MRI data. and compared the model and data parameter values between the healthy and PAD subjects, and between individuals with different exercise loads. The comparison results showed that the functional parameters from the proposed model and data features were able to differentiate healthy versus PAD, and were sensitive to exercise intensity. This study suggests that exercise-recovery MRI is a promising tool for functional assessment of calf muscle and has potential in improving clinical management of PAD. |
