Peripheral Vascular Compliance

The purpose of this paper is to describe some recent advances in the field of vascular compliance with particular reference to a noninvasive method to compute distensibility of small blood vessels in man. Vascular compliance is defined in physiology as the ratio of a change in volume (∆V) for a given change in pressure (∆P) in any region of the vascular bed. Its value depends on the size of the vascular bed and the elastic properties of vascular wall. If the wall properties are of primary importance, then a correction is made in the compliance calculation for size and one calculates vascular distensibility, D, defined as $$ D=100\left( \Delta V/V \right)/\left( \Delta P \right) $$ (1) where V is the initial volume of the bed.