Guitar-String-Inspired Tech Enhances Blood Pressure Monitoring

Currently, doctors who need to continuously monitor a patient’s blood pressure must surgically insert a catheter into one of the individual’s arteries. However, a safer and much less invasive alternative might be on the horizon, inspired by the tuning of guitar strings.

Limitations of Arterial Catheterization

While the existing “arterial catheterization” technique provides accurate, continuous blood pressure readings, it is time-consuming to set up and calibrate. Moreover, since the catheter can remain in the artery for days, patients might experience pain, infections, bleeding, or ischemia (restricted blood flow).

As a result, doctors typically limit this technique to patients in acute care settings.

Less critical patients may use devices that repeatedly measure blood pressure with traditional inflatable cuffs. However, these devices might miss fluctuations in blood pressure between readings, and the repeated arm squeezing can become uncomfortable over time.

Innovative Inspiration from Guitar Strings

Seeking a better solution, scientists from Caltech and the California-based startup Esperto Medical drew inspiration from guitar strings.

When tuning a guitar, you adjust the tension of each string until it resonates at the desired tone when plucked. Similarly, the Caltech/Esperto team’s “resonance sonomanometry” system uses this principle in reverse to measure blood pressure.

How the Resonance Sonomanometry System Works

The system employs an external transducer to send ultrasound pulses through the patient’s skin and tissue to excite an underlying artery. By analyzing the echoes of these pulses, which bounce off the artery and return to the transducer, researchers can observe how the artery’s dimensions subtly change as it vibrates.

These changes allow for the determination of blood pressure in that artery.

Unlike other experimental systems that use ultrasound to measure blood pressure, the resonance sonomanometry system does not need recalibration after its initial use.You can apply it to any major artery and use it with a diverse patient population.

Researchers have tested the technology on the carotid, axillary, brachial, and femoral arteries of human subjects, and the results have matched those of traditional methods. They currently use a handheld ultrasound transducer, but they believe that a much smaller device could eventually replace it and be worn continuously by the patient.

Read the Original Article on: New Atlas

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