Enhancing the Clinical Utility of Renal Denervation Through Efficient Physiologic Monitoring

Abstract

Introduction: The inability to measure renal sympathetic outflow clinically poses a significant problem for patient identification and intraprocedural feedback for renal denervation. Sympathetic vasomotion is a novel physiologic measure of rhythmic vascular control that reflects renal sympathetic nervous system activity, but previous measurements of sympathetic vasomotion relied on 15-minute data recordings, which may be impractical in many clinical settings. We therefore tested whether shorter data segments can provide reliable sympathetic vasomotion assessment to enhance decision making for renal denervation. Methods: Ten swine that had previously undergone unilateral surgical renal denervation underwent four rounds of catheter-based denervation of the contralateral kidney. Sympathetic vasomotion was quantified from the time-varying arterial pressure-resistive renal blood flow transfer function of recordings obtained before and after each round of ablation. Randomly placed 1- to 14-minute data segments were scored and compared with the corresponding 15-minute sympathetic vasomotion scores across 100 passes using correlation, intraclass correlation, error, and Bland-Altman agreement metrics, and by whether they reproduced the denervation decisions made from the full recordings. Results: Agreement with the 15-minute reference score improved steeply with recording length up to approximately four minutes and slowly thereafter, with the point of diminishing returns at four minutes for every group-level measure. Four-minute data segments showed an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.94, reproduced the group-level statistical results across ablations, and preserved intraprocedural denervation decisions. Bland-Altman analysis revealed that individual-level precision continued to improve with recording length; the proportion of scores falling within a quarter of the average difference between innervated and denervated kidneys at baseline was 65 percent at four minutes and 96 percent at ten minutes. Discussion: Four-minute data segments provide a feasible minimum recording duration when the question is a group comparison or a paired, within-individual decision, such as intraprocedural confirmation that an innervated kidney has shifted toward a denervated state. When a single score must be interpreted on its own, as in preprocedural patient selection, ten-minute recordings provide greater precision. Further studies are needed to prospectively evaluate sympathetic vasomotion in clinical settings and determine whether this technology can support procedural feedback and inform patient selection.