Noninvasive measurement of arterial blood pressure and elastic properties using photoelectric plethysmography technique.

The objective of this paper is to review our developed method for measuring noninvasively the arterial blood pressure as well as the mechanical properties of the vascular system in a thin portion of the biological segment such as human fingers or small animal extremities like rat tails and rabbit forelegs. This measurement is based on a principle called the 'volume-oscillometric method'. During the gradual change in cuff pressure, the amplitude of consecutive arterial volume pulsations associated with pulse pressure shows change characteristically due to the nonlinearity of arterial pressure-volume(P-V) relation. Arterial pressure can be accurately determined by detecting this characteristic change in the amplitude, while the arterial elastic properties such as P-V relationship and volume elastic modulus can be noninvasively obtained as a function of arterial transmural pressure, provided that the arterial volume changes are quantitatively determined during this pressure measurement. The validity and accuracy of this pressure and elasticity measurement with photoelectric plethysmography technique for detecting arterial volume changes are clearly demonstrated on the in vitro and in vivo experiments. Considering the simplicity and practicability of this measurement using the photoelectric plethysmography, we present a new portable instrument for the long-term ambulatory monitoring of indirect arterial pressure and a handy fully-automatic instrument for the noninvasive measurement of arterial elastic properties, and a few examples obtained by each instrument are also described.