In vivo application of a minimally invasive oximetry based perfusion sensor

Pulse oximetry is an optical technique based on the differences in absorption of blood oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin, which can be used for sensing blood flow in tissue. The inadequacy of current systemic blood flow measurements to detect changes in the local perfusion of transplanted and/or diseased organs has led us to develop a novel micro-sensor for this purpose. For this paper, we present in vivo results from a preliminary study performed to quantify the effectiveness and SNR of the sensor using a rat model. The results indicate that the sensor is able to detect changes in perfusion to the target organ in correlation to a standard laser-Doppler reference signal.