This paper presents a novel fully implantable wireless sensor system intended for long-term monitoring of hypertension patients, designed for implantation into the femoral artery with computed tomography angiography. It consists of a pressure sensor and a telemetric unit, which is wirelessly connected to an extracorporeal readout station for energy supply and data recording. The system measures intraarterial pressure at a sampling rate of 30 Hz and an accuracy of ±1.0 mmHg over a range of 30-300 mmHg, while consuming up to 300 μW. A special peel-away sheath introducer set was developed to support the implantation procedure. The system delivered stable measurements in initial animal trials in sheep, with results being in good agreement with reference sensor systems.

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High frequency ultrasonic imaging devices are widely used in minimally invasive catheter-based interventions especially in intravascular imaging, but there is still a need for more flexible devices with true 3-D volumetric imaging capability in front of the catheter tip. Single chip capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) arrays with on-chip CMOS electronics implementation provides great flexibility in designing array geometry and integrated front-end electronics. We have successfully implemented dual ring CMUT arrays for forward-looking intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and intracardiac echography (ICE) imaging which provide 3-D volumetric imaging functionality. In this paper, we report on the details of the single-chip microscale imaging system and experimental results. We also discuss system improvements with initial experimental results.