An MRI-readable wireless flexible pressure sensor

We developed a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) -detectable wireless flexible pressure sensor with pressure-sensitive LC resonator fabricated on a flexible film substrate. Measuring pressures in the body such as blood vessels and cardiac ventricle are very important in making diagnoses and in postoperative observation. However, conventional wired pressure sensors have difficulty in maintaining their connections to external readout equipment, and they also increase the risk of infection during and after implantation. In this study, to read the pressure wirelessly using an MRI system, an LC resonator consisting of a spiral coil and a pressure-sensitive capacitor was designed resonate at 300 MHz which corresponds to the Larmor frequency in an external magnetic field of 7-T. In order to validate the operating principle of the fabricated device, the frequency-impedance characteristics were measured by changing the pressure. The resonance frequencies of complemented LC circuits were lower by approximately 10% than those of nonpressured conditions. After implanting these devices in a 1% agarose gel, MR images were acquired by inducing pressures close to blood pressures of 20 kPa. As a result, contrast changes in the MR images were observed around the integrated spiral coils. This result indicated that the developed flexible pressure sensor has sufficient sensitivity to measure physiological pressure such as blood pressure of 20 kPa wirelessly in the body. In the future, quantitative pressure sensing will be evaluated by comparing it to the contrast changes in MR images with flip angle mapping.