Muscle tissue ischemia monitoring using impedance spectroscopy: preliminary results

Ischemia of muscular tissues causes changes in tissue impedance. These changes and therefore ischemia levels can be monitored by measuring tissue impedance. The overall goal of this research is to develop a muscle tissue ischemia monitoring system, based on tissue impedance measurements at various frequencies (impedance spectroscopy). For a successful instrument design, it is necessary to have some knowledge on tissue ischemia-impedance relationship, problems involved with in-vivo measurements of the tissue impedance, repeatability of measurement results, etc. For this purpose, several animal experiments, involving induced ischemia and its monitoring by impedance spectroscopy, were conducted and their results are reported in this paper. These results indicate that the proposed principle can be used for developing a muscle tissue ischemia monitoring system however, they also point out problems that have to be solved.