Validation of 4D Flow based relative pressure maps in aortic flows

While the clinical gold standard for pressure difference measurements is invasive catheterization, 4D Flow MRI is a promising tool for enabling a non-invasive quantification, by linking highly spatially resolved velocity measurements with pressure differences via the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. In this work we provide a validation and comparison with phantom and clinical patient data of pressure difference maps estimators. We compare the classical Pressure Poisson Estimator (PPE) and the new Stokes Estimator (STE) against catheter pressure measurements under a variety of stenosis severities and flow intensities. Specifically, we use several 4D Flow data sets of realistic aortic phantoms with different anatomic and hemodynamic severities and two patients with aortic coarctation. The phantom data sets are enriched by subsampling to lower resolutions, modification of the segmentation and addition of synthetic noise, in order to study the sensitivity of the pressure difference estimators to these factors. Overall, the STE method yields more accurate results than the PPE method compared to catheterization data. The superiority of the STE becomes more evident at increasing Reynolds numbers with a better capacity of capturing pressure gradients in strongly convective flow regimes. The results indicate an improved robustness of the STE method with respect to variation in lumen segmentation. However, with heuristic removal of the wall-voxels, the PPE can reach a comparable accuracy for lower Reynolds’ numbers.