A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, led by Professor John X.J. Zhang in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, have made a recent breakthrough in the design of a “smart catheter” with integrated sensors, which was recently published in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering.
Left to right: Graduate student Tushar Sharma holds a commercial catheter with a flexible pressure
sensor mounted on the surface while Professor John X.J. Zhang holds multiple flexible pressure
sensors fabricated on a 4-inch substrate.
A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, led by Professor John X.J. Zhang in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, have made a recent breakthrough in the design of a “smart catheter” with integrated sensors, which was recently published in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering.
The catheter will provide more accurate pressure measurements than those currently in use, which is especially important for applications in cardiovascular disease related surgeries and procedures. Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the U.S. and worldwide.
The “smart catheter,” developed by graduate student Tushar Sharma along with Zhang, Dr. Billy Gill from the UT Health Science Center in Houston, and BME undergraduate students Sahil Naik and Jewel Langevine, has applications for use in trauma surgeries as well as angioplasties and other cardiovasular procedures. It is innovative because it employs a flexible sensor technology. This technology can be wrapped around a curved surface, such as the surface of a catheter, which allows for real-time measurements of pressure and flow with minimum invasiveness, providing cardiovascular physicians with exact information regarding blood flow and pressure.
“Development for highly sensitive sensors can eliminate all the guess work during a trauma surgery and provide the surgeons with efficient tools to monitor the catheter placement,” said Dr. Zhang. “We are very excited that the recent advancement of nanomaterials coupled with microfabrication truly enabled such a breakthrough.”
