Novel Catheter Multiscope: A Feasibility Study

Open Challenges: Continuous monitoring of fundamental cardiovascular hemodynamic parameters is essential to accomplish critical care diagnostics. Today's standard of care measures these critical parameters using multiple monitoring technologies. These state-of-the-art technologies require expensive instrumentation and complex infrastructure. Therefore, it is challenging to use current technologies to accomplish monitoring in a low resource setting.

In order to address the challenges caused by having to use multiple monitoring systems, a point of care monitoring device was developed in this work to provide multiple critical parameters by uniquely measuring the hemodynamic process.

To demonstrate the usability of this novel catheter multiscope, a feasibility study was performed using an animal model. The developed measurement system first acquires the dynamics of blood flow through a minimally invasive catheter. Then, a signal processing framework was developed to characterize the blood flow dynamics and to obtain critical parameters such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure. The framework used to extract the physiological data corresponding to the acoustic field of the blood flow consisted of a noise cancellation method and wavelet-based source separation.

The preliminary results of the acoustic pressure field of the blood flow revealed the presence of acoustic heart and respiratory pulses. A unique framework was also developed to extract continuous blood pressure from the acoustic pressure field of the blood flow. Finally, the computed heart and respiratory rates, systolic and diastolic pressures were benchmarked with actual values measured using conventional devices to validate the hypothesis.

The results confirm that catheter multiscope can provide multiple critical parameters with clinical reliability.

A novel critical care monitoring system has been developed to accurately measure heart rate, respiratory rate, systolic and diastolic pressures from the blood flow dynamics.