Researchers Create Tiny 3D Printed Telemetric Sensors Designed For Cardiac Research
Advanced testing of medical treatments often involves
experimentation on small laboratory animals like genetically modified mice.
The work itself helps researchers develop medication and
cures for humans illnesses, and that’s created a need for innovative telemetry
systems to enable remote, real-time monitoring of various biological processes.
Perhaps the most critical applications of these technologies are related to
cardiac monitoring.
Researchers have focused on creating wireless, implantable
systems with integrated blood pressure sensors and fully implantable
cardiovascular pressure monitors which include a stent. But the design of such
systems gets dicey when designers are forced to deal with smaller-sized test
subjects as opposed to larger patients like human beings. Large external
components – with larger power sources – just won’t fit the bill.
IFNow work by Kyle G. Fricke at the University of Western
Ontario and done under the direction of Dr. Robert Sobot is focusing on the
design of a wireless telemetry system architecture, intended to retrieve blood
pressure and volume data that, due to its design and prototyping with 3D
printing processes, checks in at a svelte 2.475 cm3 and weights just over 4
grams.
The paper on the subject, “Wireless Telemetry System for
Implantable Sensors,” is focused on the development of tiny telemetry systems
able to capture, process, and transmit specific biological process information
to an end device, either wired or wirelessly.
These sorts of biomedical data collectors can grab
information from inside a living body. But the issue of size is important in
cardiac research. Scientists study what are called “real-time left ventricular
pressure-volume loops” as their main tools to analyze the health of myocardium
in animals and humans. The PV loop data is used to quantify cardiac pathology
like congestive heart failure.
IFThe work is currently done using a four-electrode catheter
system inserted into the subject’s left ventricle. It generates an electric
field used for continuously measuring such activity, and those catheters are
attached to an external base station which prevents the subject from moving
freely in a normal environment.
Implants, on the other hand, create a much more useful
measuring environment and could contain all sensor electronics, power and data
transmission electronics.
Fricke’s work uses 3D modeling and printing where
functionality and miniaturization are crucial to the prototyping of the system,
and he says 3D printing processes using biocompatible materials like
polycarbonate-ISO and various metals are the technology of choice.
The tiny, biocompatible capsules could be located inside a
test animal’s body with the catheter so small it could be placed inside the
left ventricle of even the smallest test subjects.
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