RESEARCH ARTICLE
An Assessment of Pulse Transit Time For Detecting Heavy Blood Loss During Surgical Operation
Chien-Hao Wang 1, Cheng-Wei Lu 1, 2, Tzu-Yu Lin 1, 2, Maysam F Abbod 3, Jiann-Shing Shieh 1, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 6
First Page: 104
Last Page: 111
Publisher ID: TOBEJ-6-104
DOI: 10.2174/1874120701206010104
Article History:
Received Date: 6/6/2012Revision Received Date: 7/9/2012
Acceptance Date: 5/10/2012
Electronic publication date: 28/12/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/), which permits unrestrictive use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The main contribution of this paper is the use of non-invasive measurements such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmographic (PPG) pulse oximetry waveforms to develop a new physiological signal analysis technique for detecting blood loss during surgical operation. Urological surgery cases were considered as the control group due to its generality, and cardiac surgery as experimental group since it involves blood loss and water supply. Results show that the control group has the tendency of a reduction of the pulse transient time (PTT), and this indicates an increment in the blood flow velocity changes from slow to fast. While for the experimental group, the PTT indicates high values during blood loss, and low values during water supply. Statistical analysis shows considerable differences (i.e., P <0.05) between both groups leading to the conclusion that PTT could be a good indicator for monitoring patients' blood loss during a surgical operation.