Abstract
A noninvasive oximeter that analyses the oxygen saturation of arterial blood in the fingertip is described. The light, after attenuating the infrared portion to avoid thermal injury, is applied to the fingertip through an optical transmitter made of glass fibres. The transmitted light is transferred to an optical reception system where a spectrophotometric determination of oxygen saturation is performed. The determination is performed by considering only the change in the attenuation of light caused by the inflow of arterial blood into the fingertip. The correlation between the oxygen saturation measured with the present instrument (y) and that with the blood-gas method (x), was y=0·907x+8·592 with a standard deviation and a correlation coefficient of 0·135% and 0·983, respectively. The reproducibility was assessed in a healthy subject by measuring the oxygen saturation repeatedly 60 times. The mean saturation was 95·82±0·675% (mean±standard deviation). The instrument has been useful in monitoring arterial oxygenation in patients with respiratory failure in our intensive-care unit. One of the disadvantages of the instrument is that the measurement is interrupted when the fingertip changes its position against the light beam.
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Yoshiya, I., Shimada, Y. & Tanaka, K. Spectrophotometric monitoring of arterial oxygen saturation in the fingertip. Med. Biol. Eng. Comput. 18, 27–32 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02442476
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02442476