One way to test for endothelial dysfunction is to temporarily occlude an artery and observe how the blood flow reacts upon reopening of the artery. One such test, the Brachial Artery Reactivity Test (BART), was performed on subjects with and without Coronary Artery Disease (CAD). Traditionally, flow velocity and artery diameter are measured in the brachial artery using Doppler ultrasound during the test. This study departs from the traditional test method in two important ways: First, blood flow was measured directly using a novel sensor called the thermodiffusion probe which, unlike traditional methods, provides a continuous graph of blood flow versus time. Second, blood flow was measured in the tissue of the hand rather than in the brachial artery. In this manner, BART was performed on 17 subjects with CAD and 26 subjects without CAD.

The focus of this study is to analyze this test data in order to find differences in blood flow and/or temperature between those subjects with CAD and those without CAD based on the state of their endothelium. In the future, knowledge of these differences might then be used to devise as a predictive test to screen for subjects who are at risk of developing CAD. Analysis is being performed both on baseline and hyperemic data, in the time and frequency domains.