2021/06/25 by Gizem Tabak, Jae Won Choi, Tabak, Gizem +7
Engineering · Medicine · #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Physical sciences #Gastrointestinal Bleeding Diagnosis and Treatment #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Medical Physics (physics.med-ph) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #Wireless Body Area Networks #Wireless Power Transfer Systems #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.13655
openalex publication_date 2021/06/25 · openalex created_date 2021/07/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The use of wireless implanted medical devices (IMDs) is growing because they facilitate continuous monitoring of patients during normal activities, simplify medical procedures required for data retrieval and reduce the likelihood of infection associated with trailing wires. However, most of the state-of-the-art IMDs are passive and offline devices. One of the key obstacles to an active and online IMD is the infeasibility of real-time, high-quality video broadcast from the IMD. Such broadcast would help develop innovative devices such as a video-streaming capsule endoscopy (CE) pill with therapeutic intervention capabilities. State-of-the-art IMDs employ radio-frequency electromagnetic waves for information transmission. However, high attenuation of RF-EM waves in tissues and federal restrictions on the transmit power and operable bandwidth lead to fundamental performance constraints for IMDs employing RF links, and prevent achieving high data rates that could accomodate video broadcast. In this work, ultrasonic waves were used for video transmission and broadcast through biological tissues. The proposed proof-of-concept system was tested on a porcine intestine ex vivo and a rabbit in vivo. It was demonstrated that using a millimeter-sized, implanted biocompatible transducer operating at 1.1-1.2 MHz, it was possible to transmit endoscopic video with high resolution (1280 pixels by 720 pixels) through porcine intestine wrapped with bacon, and to broadcast standard definition (640 pixels by 480 pixels) video near real-time through rabbit abdomen in vivo. A media repository that includes experimental demonstrations and media files accompanies this paper. The accompanying media repository can be found at this link: https://bit.ly/3wuc7tk.