Ultrasound Method Creates A Better Image of Cardiovascular Health

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have discovered a new and more accurate way to distinguish between harmful and harmless plaque in the blood vessels by using ultrasound. This can help healthcare providers determine the risk of strokes and heart attacks, which means avoiding unnecessary surgery for many patients. People with cardiovascular diseases, and diabetics who risk developing them, can benefit from this new and accurate method.

Transcript

00:00:00 what we found is a method where we use ultrasound to uh uh determine if plaques in the artery are dangerous or or not that means if they are prone to Rapture and to cause uh stroke uh and cardiovascular events well the ultrasound uh when it travels through the body it is attenuated and it is reflected uh and uh what we do is we have to uh compensate for this

00:00:27 attenuation of the frequency and then we measure frequency of the reflected ultrasound and that tells us something about the tissue a dangerous plaque tends to uh contain a lot of lipids uh macrophages and Hemorrhage which means inflammation and bleeding if a plaque Birds uh that causes the formation of of thrombus which causes blood clots uh and the blood clots could um stop the blood

00:00:53 uh either at the site of the rupture or further Downstream like in the brain causing stroke ultrasound is a very safe and very cheap technology and uh if we can uh detect dangerous plaques using ultrasound that gives us the possibility to screen uh a larger population and to find the individuals uh which may have these plaques in an earlier States and that is very beneficial

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