Can anyone help me locate a source for inexpensive *new* blood
pressure measuring equipment?
I have been having trouble locating simple equipment for measuring
direct arterial blood pressure in rats. My budget period ends soon,
and I need to spend this fast.
The commercial products I have found are Mega packages with fancier
computer controls than I need, and these cost far more than my
roughly $7000 can allow (e.g., Harvard Instruments, BrainWave Systems,
etc.). Stoelting has a fairly inexpensive apparatus, but it only
has 2 channels. I want *new* equipment, because I am already
disgusted with the quirks of old stuff.
I need to measure MAP, systolic, diastolic, and heart rate in freely
moving rodents. Thus, no indirect systems. I need to measure 3 or
4 at a time. I'll use Cobe disposable transducers and cables connected
to signal conditioners in a frame of some kind. I have an original
IBM 6-MHz AT with EGA that I can dedicate both as a display
device and as data storage. I don't really need a full-blown computer-
driven interface for the equipment, or even a sophisticated graphical
display of the data. It would be sufficient to have the data come in
through an AD board and stored in binary files. A small library of
routines (with source code) to manipulate the files would be nice,
but I can write my own front end as long as the formats of the data
stream and binary files are known.
--
Doug Fitts
Department of Psychology
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
dfitts at u.washington.edu
