Abstract: A medical device for triggering the inflation of a pulmonary artery catheter balloon. The device generally comprises a waveform analysis machine that monitors the pulmonary artery blood pressure waveform and triggers the inflation of the catheter balloon at such a time as to cause occlusion of the pulmonary artery during the systolic upstroke. The time of occlusion is then readily apparent in the resulting decaying blood pressure waveform, which may then be used as a basis for compartment model estimation of the pulmonary capillary pressure.

Abstract: A medical device for estimation of pulmonary wedge pressure wherein a non-occluded pulmonary artery blood pressure measurement is utilized to directly estimate the pulmonary wedge pressure. A neural network is trained with occlusion-obtained data, whereafter the trained coefficients are utilized to implement the wedge pressure estimator. A flow-directed catheter is utilized to transduce the pressure waveform, which is then input to the processing computer through a analog-to-digital data acquisition board. The data is preprocessed in the computer in order to present the neural network with 11 samples of blood pressure data and 11 samples of time-correlated first derivatives of the blood pressure data as well as an indication of the length in time of the heartbeat. The trained neural network then directly outputs the estimated wedge pressure.