Development of one-dimensional mathematical model for validation of pulse diagnosis

Integration of modern medicine and CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) has been drawn our attention for the expectation of the development of a new medical technology. The pulse diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine is one of the well-known CAM. The doctor diagnoses not only illness but also decline of health of the patient from the sense of the pulse wave of the radial artery. However, this technique does not have concrete scientific evidence. Therefore, in this paper, a simple mathematical model of the circulatory system of an arm and the tissue surrounding the radial artery was presented to reproduce the pulse wave measurement during the pulse diagnosis. Experiment was first performed to obtain the pressure wave form as the standard by pressing down a pressure sensor against the radial artery. Numerical simulation was performed for the same condition as experiment. By comparing the measurement and computational results, mechanical property of the tissue model and tube law of the artery can be determined from the mean pressure variation, and viscous resistance of the artery can be determined from the amplitude of the pressure oscillation.