INVASIVE. blood pressure montior?

Question

How does a INVASIVE blood pressure montior work and what is one actually (if you had to define it)

Answer 1

Invasive blood pressure monitoring is an invasive direct arterial pressure measurement by placing a cannula needle in an artery - either radial, femoral, dorsalis pedis or brachial arteries. An anesthesiologist or surgeon usually does this in a hospital setting.

The intravascular cannula is then connected to a sterile, fluid-filled system (intravenous fluid), which is connected to an electronic pressure transducer. The pressure is then constantly monitored beat-by-beat, and a waveform (a graph of pressure against time) displayed on a monitor.

Answer 2

Just ask anybody in the business about A-lines. Catheterizing a radial artery and measuring blood pressure that way is fairly routine in expensive care units. A special catheter or just a normal IV catheter is placed in the radial artery, and a saline infusion, sometimes heparinized, is maintained under pressure to avoid clotting. A pressure transducer can read the blood pressure at it is transmitted up the line. Even more invasive, of course, is Schwann-Ganz catheterization, which you might also want to search while you're on the computer.

Answer 3

I put in 2 arterial lines today.

It's a way to measure blood pressure directly, with an IV catheter inside an artery. We then can see the pressure wave on our monitor, and see the blood pressure every time the heart beats.

Here's a drawing of the setup:
http://www.aic.cuhk.edu.hk/web8/art_line_set.gif

And here is what one looks like in place:
http://intensivecare.hsnet.nsw.gov.au/five/images/arterial.jpg

This is a tracing that we would see:
http://www.ciap.health.nsw.gov.au/hospolic/stvincents/stvin99/images/trace.jpg

The top of the peaks is the systolic pressure, and the bottom of the troughs is the diastolic pressure.