10.5 COMPARISON OF ARTERIAL STIFFNESS ASSESSED BY POPMÈTRE® WITH ARTERIAL STIFFNESS ASSESSED BY APPLANATION TONOMETRY: A CLINICAL STUDY

Background: Large artery stiffness is recognized as a strong, independent marker of cardiovascular risk, mainly through aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV). pOpmètre® is a new non-invasive method, which estimates aortic PWV through finger-toe (FT) wave analysis. In a previous study, Alivon et al. have shown an acceptable correlation (r2 = 0.43 for PWV) between pOpmètre® and the reference method Sphygmocor. However this study led to the necessity to optimize the algorithm and the procedures because of the presence of several outliers involving mainly obese and elderly subjects. Materials and Methods: The pOpmètre® has 2 photodiodes sensors, positioned on the finger and on the toe. A particular attention was drawn on positioning of the toe sensor so that the pulp was in contact with the photodiode. Different signal processing chains were applied and no cut-off value was used for pulse height. Applanation tonometry was performed for CF PWV measurements. Results: 45 subjects were included: 18 healthy subjects and 27 patients with essential hypertension aged 32± 7 years and 58 ±18 years respectively. The correlation between FT PWV and CF PWV was good and significant (r2 = 0.77 p