Quality assessment of catheter-manometer systems based on quantified clinical requirements

For invasive blood pressure measurements, catheter-tip-manometer (CTM) systems are much more accurate than fluid-filled catheter-manometer (FCM) systems. In common clinical practice CTM systems are not used because of their relatively high costs. A quantitative evaluation of the functional specifications of FCM systems should play an important role in this cost-benefit analysis. The test methods for the physical parameters of FCM systems the authors found in literature do not provide a clear answer whether an FCM system is accurate enough. Here, they present a straight forward in-vitro test method that relates, unlike other methods found in the literature, the quality of FCM systems directly to quantified clinical requirements. This method quantifies the distortion of fluid-filled systems based on a reference set of physiological blood pressure waveforms obtained using catheter-tip manometers. The innovative aspect of this paper is the synthetic approach to test FCM systems in an in-vitro set up based on quantified clinical requirements