Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jul 17, 2024
Date Accepted: Jun 12, 2025
Hemodynamic Assessment of the Hand Arterial Perfusion Through the Duplex Ultrasound Scan Hand Acceleration Time (HAT) Technique: Study Protocol of a Cross-Sectional Descriptive Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Several non-invasive methods can be used to assess hand perfusion, but none has been standardized for diagnosing chronic upper limb ischemia. One potentially useful diagnostic tool for this purpose is the ultrasonographic hand acceleration time (HAT), although it still requires characterization and validation.
Objective:
This study aims to describe the technique for assessing hand perfusion through the HAT while quantifying it in patients with chronic upper limb ischemia and healthy volunteers.
Methods:
This will be a cross-sectional, prospective, and descriptive study of HAT measurements with Duplex Ultrasound. We will assess the hand’s arterial perfusion in chronic upper limb ischemia patients and healthy volunteers (i.e., without any known cardiovascular risk factor). Both patients and volunteers must be adults of either sex. The primary variables will be the HAT measurements in four different hand arteries. We will perform a standard descriptive analysis of all study variables. We will use the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test (independent samples) to make inferences when applicable.
Results:
We expect the results to serve as a starting point for future studies regarding cutoff values (allowing for future fine-tuning) while supplying valuable data for an adequate sample size calculation.
Conclusions:
To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first study describing the HAT technique and comparing the results of both chronic upper limb ischemia patients and healthy volunteers. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov registration: NCT05977725
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.