Development of an measuring system for pulse wave corresponding to different radial artery diameters caused by indentation

Noninvasive radial artery pulse wave has been widely used not only for the pulse wave analysis (PWA) itself but also for assessment of arterial stiffness with estimated aortic pulse wave from peripheral pulse wave. However, it has been found that the deformation of pulse shape can be caused readily by changing measuring position, indentation pressure, and so on. So, in this study, we have developed a system which can measure radial pulse wave and skin displacement simultaneously while the indentation body goes down to occlude subject's radial artery. This system can be divided into a measuring apparatus part, an indentation control hardware part, a data acquisition part and a control and computation part. And, the measuring apparatus consists of an arm-rest, a step motor, an indentation body, a laser displacement sensor(LK-G30, Keyence Co.) and pulse wave sensor. Under load-free condition and radial artery loaded condition, the evaluation of developed system has been performed. From these results, we can conclude: 1) The developed system can control the indentation body quantitatively and the adopted laser displacement sensor shows linear output characteristic even with skin as a reflector. 2) This system can measure the pulse wave and the displacement of indentation body, that is, skin displacement simultaneously at each specific level of indentation body. 3) This system can provide the number of motor steps used to get down the indentation body, the measured skin displacement, the calculated indentation pressure, the calculated pulse pressure and the pulse waveform as well as the information generated by combining these with each others. 4) This system can reveal the relationship between the morphological changes of pulse wave and the estimated displacement of radial artery wall by indentation. Consequently, the developed system can furnish more abundant information on radial artery than previous diagnosis systems based on tonometric measurement. In further study, we expect to setup the standard measuring process and to concrete the algorithm for the estimation of radial artery's diameter and of displacement of radial artery's wall. Furthermore, with well designed clinical studies, we hope to turn out the usefulness of developed system in the field of cardiovascular system evaluation.