Carotid arterial blood pressure waveform monitoring using a portable ultrasound system

This work presents a non-invasive arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveform monitoring technique using ultrasound. A portable ultrasound system to excite ultrasound transducers and acquire data is designed with off-the-shelf components. The insonation angles are identified using a vector Doppler technique based on the cosine dependency of the Doppler signals. The pulse pressure of an estimated waveform at the left common carotid artery is compared to the standard sphygmomanometer measurement in a clinical test. The estimated carotid ABP waveform shows excellent agreement to the finger ABP waveform with expected discrepancy of the systolic peak shape due to different measurement sites. The proposed method also tracks slow blood pressure fluctuations. This validation on human subjects shows potential for a noninvasive blood pressure waveform monitoring device at central arterial sites.