Stanford researchers create a wireless, battery-free, biodegradable blood flow sensor

A new device developed by Stanford University researchers could make it easier for doctors to monitor the success of blood vessel surgery. The sensor monitors the flow of blood through an artery. It is biodegradable, battery-free and wireless, so it is compact and doesn’t need to be removed and it can warn a patient’s doctor if there is a blockage.
“Measurement of blood flow is critical in many medical specialties, so a wireless biodegradable sensor could impact multiple fields including vascular, transplant, reconstructive and cardiac surgery,” said Paige Fox, assistant professor of surgery and co-senior author of the paper.
Monitoring the success of surgery on blood vessels is challenging as the first sign of trouble often comes too late. By that time, the patient often needs additional surgery that carries risks similar to the original procedure. This new sensor could let doctors keep tabs on a healing vessel from afar, creating opportunities for earlier interventions.
The sensor wraps snugly around the healing vessel, where blood pulsing past pushes on its inner surface. As the shape of that surface changes, it alters the sensor’s capacity to store electric charge, which doctors can detect remotely from a device located near the skin but outside the body. That device solicits a reading by pinging the antenna of the sensor, similar to an ID card scanner. In the future, this device could come in the form of a stick-on patch or be integrated into other technology, like a wearable device or smartphone.
The researchers first tested the sensor in an artificial setting where they pumped air through an artery-sized tube to mimic pulsing blood flow. Surgeon Yukitoshi Kaizawa, a former postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and co-author of the paper, also implanted the sensor around an artery in a rat. Even at such a small scale, the sensor successfully reported blood flow to the wireless reader. At this point, they were only interested in detecting complete blockages, but they did see indications that future versions of this sensor could identify finer fluctuations of blood flow.
Stanford University https://tinyurl.com/y6g4qmng