Invasive intraarterial blood pressure measurement is currently the gold standard for intraoperative hemodynamic monitoring but accurate systolic blood pressure (SBP) measurement is difficult in everyday clinical practice, mostly because of problems with hyper-resonance or damping within the measurement system, which can lead to erroneous treatment decisions if these phenomena are not recognized. A hyper-resonant blood pressure trace significantly overestimates true systolic blood pressure while underestimating the diastolic pressure. Invasively measured systolic blood pressure is also significantly more affected than mean blood pressure by the site of measurement within the arterial system. Patients in the intraoperative period should be treated based on the invasively measured mean blood pressure rather than the systolic blood pressure. In this review, we discuss the pros/cons, mechanisms of Disposable IBP Transducers, and the interpretation of the invasively measured systolic blood pressure value.

Introduction & Background

Disposable IBP Transducer Kit-Single Channel is the gold standard of arterial pressure measurement in 10-20% of high-risk patients [1-2]. In the remaining 80%-90% of surgical patients, the standard intermittent non-invasive blood pressure (BP) that is obtained using oscillometry with a brachial cuff has been shown to have only poor agreement with IBP in critically ill patients [3-4]. These observed measurement differences are clinically significant because they would have triggered a change in treatment in as many as 20% of the critical care patients. Non-invasive oscillometric BP measurement with a brachial cuff tends to, on average, overestimate BP during hypotension and underestimate BP during hypertension, with a significant bias and considerable scatter. Invasive BP measurement with an arterial catheter, providing continuous BP measurements, detected nearly twice as many episodes of hypotension as intermittent oscillometric measurements with a brachial cuff [5]. Continuous rather than intermittent hemodynamic monitoring is highly desirable in high-risk patients. Even when continuous BP monitoring was accomplished in medium-risk patients with non-invasive techniques, the number of episodes of intraoperative hypotension was still reduced by half when compared to intermittent monitoring with a brachial cuff [6]. Although non-invasive continuous monitoring has fewer complications than arterial cannulation, it has not yet Disposable IBP Transducer Kit-Double Channel as the gold standard in high-risk patients, but rather serves as an alternative in low and medium-risk patients where IBP measurements are not warranted [7].

An adequate blood pressure level is a means to achieve the ultimate goal of the circulation, which is adequate end-organ perfusion and tissue oxygenation. Adequate organ perfusion is mostly regulated locally, in the organs, by changing the local vascular resistance, which, when seen over multiple organs and the entire circulation, works as a re-distribution of the total flow or cardiac output (CO) [8]. In addition, the total flow or CO is also regulated centrally if this re-distribution is not enough. The local flow control via regulation of resistance of the arterioles only functions properly under the condition of adequate perfusion pressure, in which the mean systemic arterial pressure plays a central role. Continuous monitoring of local organ circulation, global flow, or CO and arterial pressure is, therefore, the key. Monitoring the microcirculation has been shown to be useful when determining the optimal BP range that is associated with adequate regulation of local blood flow and tissue oxygenation for an individual patient [9-10]. Pulse contour analysis provides a means of assessing global flow or CO because it has long been recognized that an apparently adequate BP level may not necessarily be associated with an adequate total blood flow to all the tissues [11-12]. Different organs have a different range of perfusion pressures that allow for adequate local control of organ flow. While the coronary circulation can increase flow fivefold as long as heart rate is maintained at 70 bpm, diastolic arterial pressure is maintained at adequate levels and coronary obstructive lesions are absent, the kidney is much more sensitive to decreases in perfusion pressure [13]. The average lower limit of cerebral blood flow autoregulation in normotensive adult humans is around a mean arterial pressure (MAP) of 70 mmHg [14]. Hence, the heart has a greater range of adequate perfusion pressures than both the brain and the kidneys. Blood pressure goals as adequate perfusion pressure ranges, therefore, need to be specifically determined and adjusted for every individual clinical situation by considering the patient’s specific comorbidities as well as the planned surgical procedure.

Blood pressure and surgical outcomes 

Although the real target is adequate total blood flow and adequate local flow to individual organs, most outcome data are available for blood pressure. Hypotension has been associated with increased postoperative morbidity. Even short durations of intraoperative MAP less than 55 mmHg are associated with myocardial injury and acute kidney injury (AKI) [15]. A perioperative quality initiative consensus statement also concluded that even brief durations of systolic arterial pressure <100 mmHg and mean arterial pressure <60-70 mmHg are harmful during non-cardiac surgery even without prospective studies [16]. Patients with preoperative hypertension may be more susceptible to complications from perioperative hypotension [17]. In contrast to hypotension, the degree of hypertension that is associated with harm to the patient is more difficult to define. In adult non-cardiac surgical patients, there is insufficient evidence to recommend a general upper limit of arterial pressure at which therapy should be initiated, although systolic blood pressure (SBP) above 160 mmHg has been associated with myocardial injury and infarction [18].

How is IBP measured?

Disposable IBP Transducer Kit-Triple Channel, in essence, replaces a small part of the wall of an artery with a stiff membrane inside a pressure transducer. To achieve this, it requires the cannulation of an artery with a stiff short catheter and the use of a short and stiff tube to connect the cannula to the transducer. In order to measure pressure, a hydrostatic reference level needs to be defined - usually, this is the level of the right atrium - and the transducer needs to be kept at the correct reference level all the time. Each component of the measurement system - transducer, hydrostatic leveling, cannula, tubing - will introduce inaccuracies or measurement errors.

Transducer

The transducer nowadays is almost always a disposable pressure transducer, which is factory-calibrated by the manufacturer. The accuracy of the disposable transducers typically is better than the accuracy required of less than ±3% or ±3 mmHg by the International Organization for Standardization/American National Standards Institution (ISO/ANSI) standard [19-20]. It needs to be zeroed, and since transducers are prone to baseline drift, this should be performed at regular intervals. In terms of quantitative error, these effects will cause a small bias of less than 3 mmHg, which is not clinically relevant in routine patient monitoring but should be considered in research or validation studies.

Leveling

The pressure transducer should be placed at heart level; by convention, this is set at the level of the right atrium. A leveling error of 10 cm will cause a measurement error of 7.4 mmHg. In clinical practice, a mean error of 3 mmHg with a standard deviation of 2 mmHg has been reported [21-22]. Again, this is probably not clinically relevant in routine patient monitoring but to be considered in research or validation studies. A more unpredictable component of leveling error is in the position changes of the operating table (rotation, tilting) where it may be difficult to maintain the proper reference position at the right atrium. It will certainly add to the overall error and is hard to quantify.

Resonance and damping

The combined system of cannula, tubing, and transducer can be seen as a second-order transmission line that guides the intra-arterial pulse wave to the transducer membrane [23-24]. This second-order system can be characterized by its natural or resonance frequency and its damping factor [25-26]. The natural frequency of the measurement system must exceed the frequency range of the arterial pulse, which extends to 20-25 Hz [23,27] or 20-22 harmonics when the goal is to accurately determine the maximum rate of pressure during isovolumetric contraction (dP/dtmax) of the systolic upstroke [28]. Higher natural frequencies can be obtained by making the cannula and the connective tubing shorter, wider, and stiffer [23,29-30]. The systems also exhibit damping, caused by friction and the viscosity of the filling fluid. Critical damping is the amount of damping required to prevent overshoot. The damping coefficient of a critically damped system is 1, however, this results in a relatively slow responding system. A damping coefficient of 0.64, sometimes called optimal damping, provides a good compromise between responsiveness and distortion. In theory, with such a damping coefficient, the amplitude is accurately measured up to 2/3 of the natural frequency, within 2%, and only shows a distortion of 6% at the natural frequency. In clinical practice, however, natural frequencies ranging from 12 to 25 Hz and damping coefficients ranging from 0.12 to 0.33 are observed [21,23,26,31-33], indicating that in clinical practice, the system is often underdamped with resonance frequencies in the same range as the frequency content of the pressure signal. An artificial increase in IBP has also been observed when the three-way stopcock is in an off-center position. On the other side, blood clots, kinking in the cannula, clamping of the arterial line tubing [34], air bubbles in the tubing, or narrow, long, or compliant tubing can cause the system to be over-damped, with damping coefficients larger than the critical damping. Whenever a dampened trace is encountered in clinical practice, the cause should be investigated. Damping will result in under-reading of SBP and dP/dtmax and over-reading of diastolic blood pressure (DBP). In under-damped situations, SBP average over-estimation was as large as 28.5 ±15.9 (mean±SD) mmHg [26] where the large scatter could be caused by the error varying with frequency and heart rate. Even adequate systems according to the criteria proposed by Gardner [35] showed an SBP over-estimation of 2.6±1.9 (mean±SD) mmHg [33].

Problems occur in clinical practice when a hyper-resonant IBP Transducer Core Part trace overestimates the SBP and a surgeon decides, for example, to limit the SBP to 100 mmHg when the patient is separating from cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). If there is insufficient damping in the system, the measured SBP will be 100 mmHg while the MAP at the same time may be too low to provide adequate coronary perfusion. The patient may then have to be placed back urgently and perhaps unnecessarily onto CPB due to the erroneous overestimation of the SBP as a result of this hyperresonance artifact. The effects of resonance and damping must therefore be carefully considered whenever making treatment decisions based on the SBP. If the trace looks hyper-resonant or over-damped, the treatment decisions should be based on the MAP. If clinicians insist on making treatment decisions based on SBP then the damping within the measurement system must first be optimized before it is safe to use SBP to guide therapy.