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Noninvasive pulmonary artery pressure monitoring by EIT: a model-based feasibility study

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Abstract

Current monitoring modalities for patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH) are limited to invasive solutions. A novel approach for the noninvasive and unsupervised monitoring of pulmonary artery pressure (PAP) in patients with PH was proposed and investigated. The approach was based on the use of electrical impedance tomography (EIT), a noninvasive and safe monitoring technique, and was tested through simulations on a realistic 4D bio-impedance model of the human thorax. Changes in PAP were induced in the model by simulating multiple types of hypertensive conditions. A timing parameter physiologically linked to the PAP via the so-called pulse wave velocity principle was automatically estimated from the EIT data. It was found that changes in PAP could indeed be reliably monitored by EIT, irrespective of the pathophysiological condition that caused them. If confirmed clinically, these findings could open the way for a new generation of noninvasive PAP monitoring solutions for the follow-up of patients with PH.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. P. Reymond and T. Billiet (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) for providing the anatomical and circulatory models of the large pulmonary arteries, as well as Prof. A. Adler (Carleton University, Canada) for many valuable discussions. This work was supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under Grant 205321-153364/1 and the SNSF/Nano-Tera project ObeSense (20NA21-1430801).

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  1. Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM), Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Martin Proença, Fabian Braun, Josep Solà & Mathieu Lemay

  2. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Martin Proença, Fabian Braun & Jean-Philippe Thiran

  3. University Hospital Center (CHUV) and University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jean-Philippe Thiran

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Proença, M., Braun, F., Solà, J. et al. Noninvasive pulmonary artery pressure monitoring by EIT: a model-based feasibility study. Med Biol Eng Comput 55, 949–963 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-016-1570-1

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