Assessment of common carotid artery wall stiffness using shear wave elastography: a promising technique for evaluating active and inactive Behçet's disease.

Abstract

Background: Behçet's disease (BD) is a multisystem vasculitis that affects arteries and veins of all sizes. This study aimed to investigate the value of shear wave elastography (SWE) in evaluating inactive and active BD patients by measuring the wall stiffness of the common carotid artery (CCA).

Methods: A total of 39 patients with BD were included in the study. Each patient was evaluated to assess if they were in active or inactive disease periods. Based on their BD current activity form scores, 19 and 20 patients were classified as active stage and inactive stage, respectively. Additionally, 22 healthy adults were included in the control group. SWE (Young's modulus) and the pulse wave velocity (PWV) were used to measure the wall stiffness of the CCA of all subjects.

Results: The wall stiffness of the CCA was significantly higher in the BD patients than the healthy subjects (P<0.05). The active stage patients had a higher wall stiffness of the CCA measured by SWE (44.42±5.23 kPa) than the inactive stage patients (35.17±4.60 kPa) (P<0.05). However, there was no significant difference in the PWV values of the CCA between the active {5.96 m/s [interquartile range (IQR), 5.35-6.62 m/s]} and inactive [5.42 m/s (IQR, 4.63-6.30 m/s)] stage patients (P>0.05). The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for distinguishing between the active stage patients and the control subjects was 0.978 for SWE imaging, which was significantly higher than that for PWV (0.776) (P<0.01).

Conclusions: By measuring arterial stiffness, SWE could serve as a promising modality for evaluating the active and inactive stages of BD. SWE was better able to evaluate the BD active stage than PWV.