A Surface-Integrated Sensor Network for Personalized Multifunctional Catheters*

Augmenting the sensing/actuating capabilities of multifunctional catheters used for minimally invasive interventions has been fostered by the reduction of transducers’ sizes. However, increasing the number of transducers to benefit from the entire catheter surface is challenging due to the number of connections and/or the required integrated circuits dedicated for multiplexing the transducer signals. Modular concepts enabling personalized catheters are lacking, at all. In this work, we investigated the feasibility of a simple and daisy-chainable transducer node network for active catheters, which overcomes these limitations. Sequentially accessible nodes enabling analog interaction (including signal buffering) with transducers were designed and fabricated using miniature components suited for catheter integration. The effective sampling rate (ESR) per node for acquiring bio-signals from 10 nodes was examined for various signal-to-noise ratios. Thanks to the low circuit complexity, an ESR up to 20 kHz was achieved, which is high enough for many bio-signals.Clinical relevance— Typical daisy-chaining features, namely theoretically indefinite node extension and simple reconfiguration facilitates modularization of the catheter design. The proposed network consequently ensures application and patient-specific requirements while incorporating transducer functions over the entire catheter surface, both may improve minimally invasive interventions.