Silicon photonics-based laser Doppler vibrometer array for carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) measurement

• Published in: Biomedical optics express Vol. 11; no. 7; pp. 3913 - 3926
• Main Authors: Li, Yanlu, Marais, Louise, Khettab, Hakim, Quan, Zhiheng, Aasmul, Soren, Leinders, Rob, Schüler, Ralf, Morrissey, Padraic E., Greenwald, Stephen, Segers, Patrick, Vanslembrouck, Michael, Bruno, Rosa M., Boutouyrie, Pierre, O’Brien, Peter, de Melis, Mirko, Baets, Roel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Optical Society of America 01-07-2020
• ISSN: 2156-7085; 2156-7085
• DOI: 10.1364/BOE.394921

Pulse wave velocity (PWV) is a reference measure for aortic stiffness, itself an important biomarker of cardiovascular risk. To enable low-cost and easy-to-use PWV measurement devices that can be used in routine clinical practice, we have designed several handheld PWV sensors using miniaturized laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) arrays in a silicon photonics platform. The LDV-based PWV sensor design and the signal processing protocol to obtain pulse transit time (PTT) and carotid-femoral PWV in a feasibility study in humans, are described in this paper. Compared with a commercial reference PWV measurement system, measuring arterial pressure waveforms by applanation tonometry, LDV-based displacement signals resulted in more complex signals. However, we have shown that it is possible to identify reliable fiducial points for PTT calculation using the maximum of the 2 nd derivative algorithm in LDV-based signals, comparable to those obtained by the reference technique, applanation tonometry.