Background Peripheral arterial disease is a stenosis or occlusion of peripheral arteries that results in compromised blood flow and muscle ischemia. The available diagnostic methods are mostly used to measure and visualize blood flow and are not useful in the evaluation of perfusion, especially in diabetic patients, which is now considered to be a research priority by most of the vascular societies around the world as this is still a relatively poorly studied phenomenon. Objective The aim of this review is to explore the clinical significance of muscle tissue oxygenation monitoring in lower-extremity peripheral artery disease diagnosis using the near-infrared spectroscopy method. Methods A systematic search in PubMed, CINAHL, and Cochrane databases was performed to identify clinical near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) studies in English and Russian, published until September 2019, involving muscle tissue oxygenation in peripheral arterial disease (PAD). The manuscripts were reviewed by two researchers independently and scored on the quality of the research using MINORS criteria. Results After screening 443 manuscripts, 23 studies ( n = 1580) were included. NIRS-evaluated recovery time seems to be more accurate than ankle-brachial index in diabetic patients to differentiate between moderate and severe claudication. Consistent findings across all the included studies showed that both the oxygenation and deoxygenation rates as well as the recovery times varied from patient to patient and therefore were not suitable for standardization. Conclusions The clinical relevance of routine use of NIRS to diagnose PAD is unproven; therefore, its use is not currently part of standard-of-care for patients with PAD since the absolute values seem to vary significantly, depending on the outside conditions. More data need to be provided on the possible use of NIRS monitoring intraoperatively where the conditions can be more controlled.

In this paper an estimation of round-trip delay (RTD) in OPC UA server-client channel was investigated in various data communication networks including Ethernet, WiFi, and 3G. Testing was carried out using the developed IoT gateway device running OPC UA server and remote computer running OPC UA client. The server and the client machines were configured to operate in Virtual Private Network powered by OpenVPN. Experimental analysis revealed that RTD values are distributed in the wide range exhibiting difficult-to-explain outliers significantly exceeding average RTD value. A preliminary exploration of the correlation between instantaneous load of communication gateway processor and RTD peaks was carried out on ARM Cortex A8 Texas instruments processors running at 600 MHz and 800 MHz clock frequency.

Purpose To analyze the cerebrovascular autoregulation (CA) dynamics in patients with normal-tension glaucoma (NTG) and high-tension glaucoma (HTG) as well as healthy subjects using noninvasive ultrasound technologies for the first time. Methods The CA status of 10 patients with NTG, 8 patients with HTG, and 10 healthy subjects was assessed, using an innovative noninvasive ultrasonic technique, based on intracranial blood volume slow-wave measurements. Identified in each participant were intraocular pressure, ocular perfusion pressure, and CA-related parameter volumetric reactivity index (VRx), as well as the duration and doses of the longest cerebral autoregulation impairment (LCAI). In addition, we calculated the associations of these parameters with patients’ diagnoses. Results The VRx value, the LCAI dose, and duration in healthy subjects were significantly lower than in patients with NTG ( P < 0.05). However, no significant differences were noted in these parameters between healthy subjects and HTG and between NTG and HTG groups. Conclusions NTG is associated with the disturbed cerebral blood flow and could be diagnosed by performing noninvasive CA assessments. Translational Relevance The VRx monitoring method can be applied to a wider range of patient groups, especially patients with normal-tension glaucoma.

No abstract