Automatic Measurement of Venous Pressure Using B-Mode Ultrasound

Central venous pressure (CVP) information is crucial in clinical situations, such as cardiac failure, intravascular volume overload, and sepsis. The measurement of CVP, however, requires the catheterization of vena cava through the subclavian or internal jugular veins, which is an impractical and costly procedure with related risk of complications. Peripheral venous pressure (PVP), which correlates with CVP under certain patient positioning, can be measured noninvasively using ultrasound via controlled compressions of a superficial vein. This paper presents an automatic system for acquiring such noninvasive measurements. Robust signal and image processing techniques developed for this purpose are introduced in this paper. The proposed standalone mobile platform collects images in real time from the display output of any ultrasound machine, meanwhile measuring the pressure on the skin underneath the ultrasound transducer via a liquid-filled pouch. The image and pressure data are synchronized through an automated temporal calibration procedure. During forearm compressions, blood vessels are detected and tracked in the images using robust geometric (ellipse) models, the parameters of which are used further in the model-based estimation of PVP. The proposed system was tested in 56 image sequences on 14 healthy volunteers, and was shown to achieve measurements with errors comparable to or lower than the interoperator variability of expert manual assessments.