Wireless blood flow sensor wraps around arteries, self-resorbs
The thin flexible device described in a paper titled “Biodegradable and flexible arterial-pulse sensor for the wireless monitoring of blood flow” published in Nature Biomedical Engineering was designed to locally monitor blood flow after complex reconstructive surgeries involving “anastomosis”, the suturing of blood vessels, such as would be the case in cardiovascular, vascular and transplantation operations.
So far, commercially existing sensor require careful fixation and also need to be removed after use, which presents an additional surgical risk. The paper describes a thin and flexible pressure sensor made entirely of biodegradable materials, which can be wrapped around arteries as small as 1mm in diameter.
Measuring only a few square millimetres, the whole device consists of a layered fringe-field capacitive sensor sensitive in both contact (the sensor is put in contact with the artery) and non-contact modes, connected to a bilayer coil structure (made of magnesium) used for data transmission through radio-frequency coupling with an external reader coil.
Here, blood flow is indirectly measured through pulse detection as the monitored artery experiences pulsatile changes of vessel diameter which can measured by the capacitive sensor. The change in capacitance results in a shift of the resonant frequency in an inductor–capacitor–resistor circuit, which is monitored wirelessly through the skin via inductive coupling, enabling battery-free operation.
To ensure both low cost and full device resorbtion, the thin sensor is fabricated via a simple lamination and packaging process using micrometre-thin layers of bio-compatible and bio-degradable materials such as magnesium (Mg) for the electrical interconnects, poly(glycerol sebacate) for the dielectric layer, poly(octamethylenemaleate (anhydride) citrate) and polyhydroxybutyrate/polyhydroxyvalerate packaging layers, and a poly(lactic acid) spacer for the bilayer coils.
Response time is in the millisecond range, the paper reports, with a high cycling durability making the device suitable for real-time blood flow during several months right from the moment the surgery has been completed. The sensor was proven first in vitro with a custom-made artificial artery model and then in vivo in a rat model.