A Molecular Communications System for Live Detection of Hyperviscosity Syndrome.

Abstract

The hyperviscosity syndrome consists of an excessive viscosity of the blood. It has to be timely detected, since it significantly increases the risk of many cardiovascular diseases. It can manifest essentially in two different ways, depending on the capability of the cardiocirculatory system to compensate the increased resistance experienced by the blood in vessels. In case of compensation, the blood flow velocity remains nearly unaltered; otherwise a significant decrease can occur. In this paper, we propose a blood viscosity monitoring system based on molecular communications. It could be used in risky patients for continuous monitoring and can detect blood hyperviscosity both in case of compensation, even partial, and in case of uncompensated cardiocirculatory systems. This proposal results to be both simple and effective for real time estimating the blood viscosity level, without any need of resorting to invasive blood analyses. The main idea is to leverage the statistics of particle dispersion and absorption in a blood vessel as a function of blood viscosity. Viscosity is estimated by processing the statistics of the received signal molecules, which are easy to collect. These features open the way to the implementation of the proposed solution in a simple and cheap device.