Abstract
A cerebral thrombus or blood clot might cause cerebral stroke and even decease if the clot could not be dissolved within several hours after it was formed. In order to carry out an efficient clinical treatment, there exist several problems required to resolve. One of them is the measurement of solubility of blood clots in vivo, which is very important for the doctor to know the situation of the clot dissolution in an operation. In this paper, a fundamental study, on how to assist the dissolution of the thrombus with a few amount of thrombolytic agent and to measure the solubility of the thrombus in-vivo during the operation, is presented. A mechanical micro stirrer for dissolution of the thrombus is developed as a slight beam embedded with a piezo-cell. Furthermore, an approach using the stirrer also as a sensor to evaluate the solubility of blood clots in the operation is proposed. This idea comes from that the solution state of the blood influences the mechanical impedance of the stirrer, which can be measured with a high accuracy by checking the electric impedance of the piezo-cell with the so-called piezoelectric impedance based measuring technique. Both the performance of the dissolution and the measurement of the solubility by the same stirrer are investigated in detail and their validations are verified experimentally.