Pulse volume recording in the diagnosis of peripheral vascular disease

Abstract

The pulse volume recorder (PVR) was introduced by Raines almost 35 years ago in a thesis based on graduate work conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.1 The work was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The work built on earlier pioneering efforts by investigators such as T. Winsor 2 and E. Strandness. 3 The research took advantage of major recent advances in electronics, specifically in the area of pressure transducer design. However, the driving force was the increasing ability of the vascular surgeon to reconstruct peripheral arteries and the associated need to perform accurate diagnostic studies preoperatively and in follow-up. © 2007 Springer-Verlag London Limited.