Blood pressure is usually measured with a pressure meter and an inflatable cuff placed around the arm. In some clinical scenarios, however, physicians need to measure blood pressure inside a vein or artery. Until recently, such measurements were difficult or impossible to obtain.
Engineers at Microtech have developed a solution for those clinical scenarios: a sub-millimeter implantable pressure sensor. Clinicians communicate with the sensor via a proprietary ultrasound system.
Microtech developed a MATLAB® algorithm that controls an ultrasound transducer to produce ultrasound waves and processes waves reflected by the sensor. By analyzing these reflected waves, the algorithm can calculate blood pressure in the region surrounding the sensor to within one millimeter of mercury (mmHg).
“MATLAB is the natural choice for developing our signal analysis algorithms; developing in C/C++ or another language would be much more difficult,” says Dr. Yonathan Kozlovsky, research and development physicist at Microtech. “MATLAB made it easy to use live data from a data acquisition board and other lab hardware without re-implementing the algorithms.”