Development of Tubular Cardiovascular Phantom System for Pulse Transit Time Simulation

Abstract

This paper presents on the development of a tubular cardiovascular phantom system to simulate pulse transit time (PTT). The PTT defined as the delay time between two pulses in one cardiac cycle has been shown to be promising method for cuffless continuous blood pressure (BP) measurement. However most of the PTT measurement was performed on human subjects, thus giving a difficulty in validating sensor performance due to variability of BP. Therefore, a cardiovascular phantom system was proposed for simulate the PTT measurement. An electronic controlled module was developed to control pump operation for pulse generation. Plastic optical fibre (POF) sensors were used to measure the pulse signal on the flexible tube and the results were compared with an in-line pressure sensor. In this experiment, the delay time between two pulses were calculated offline using Matlab software and correlated with pulse pressure. The result demonstrate that the pulse delay time recorded by both sensors decreased with increase of pulse rate and pulse pressure. These results on the phantom study showed similar pattern to the human model, thus indicating that the system is able to simulate PTT for sensor validation purposes.

Functional and Metrological Issues in Arterial Simulators for Biomedical Testing Applications: A Review

“…Consequently, in recent years, a widespread interest has grown around parameters such as arterial stiffness (AS) and pulse wave velocity (PWV), as they are key importance indices for cardiovascular disease diagnosis and prevention [3,4]. Nevertheless, some studies addressed different problems regarding the approaches used for in vivo estimation of such parameters, mainly due to blood pressure variability [5][6][7]. Therefore, many researchers undertook the investigation of cardiovascular parameters with the help of in vitro circulatory simulations.…”

“…In the past, Berrios and Pedersen tried to use ultrasonic measurement for the detection of diameter variations in an elastic tube by applying a pressure waveform and estimating the time-shift of the ultrasound echoes from the tube walls (front and back) [18]. On the other hand, in 2019, Suhaimizan et al investigated how an in vitro system could validate the use of plastic optical fiber (POF) sensors in measuring the pulse signal by comparing the obtained results with pressure sensor data [7].…”