I am trying to build up a system with which I can measure different physiological parameters such as CO2, ECG, Heart Rate, Respiration Rate, Blood Pressure, in small animals like rats, mice, and guinea pigs. I have been looking into the Patient Monitors (e.g. DataScope Passport 2) because they are a lot more affordable than the ones designed for animals but I am not clear and sure if they are reliable and acceptable in the Animal Studies community.
Any thoughts and help will be truly appreciated.
One of the problems will be heart rate - mice can easily have up to 600 BPM while patient monitors assume a normal human heart rate. So one parameter to verify will be if the monitor in question offers an appropriate range (if you use ansethetized animals only this may be much lower than for awake anaimals of course). Also the sensors for non invasive BP and blood oyxgenation are usaually way too big.
I know it's not an answer anyone wants to hear (especially when you have a tight budget!) but unfortunately I think the more expensive animal versions are worth the investment. Klaus Eisermann has already pointed out the main limitations - even if the human devices can accommodate rodent heart/respiration rates in their range, you will probably get endless alarms going off on the system as it will think you have a very tachycardic patient!
I haven't looked into BP monitoring in a long time but it can be done with a small cuff around the tail and these have to be very sensitive devices due to the small pressures in rodent tails compared to a cuff used for a human arm (even without taking into account the physical size differences). I'm not even sure a human blood pressure monitor would reliably detect clinically relevant changes in a mouse tail even if you had the correct cuff and it could connect to the human device.
Valid points indicated by Dear John Kealy and Dear Klaus Eisermann .
I have just realized that it is a very common practice to monitor the animals' vital signs during the surgery and any experimental procedure. There exist the appropriate monitors to do so. So any sampling issues or equipment sizes issues should be resolved using those techs.
In a perfect world vital signs should be monitored during anesthesia - not to see if the animal is still alive (this is easy) but to monitor if anesthesia is deep enough and oxygenation is ok. One obstacle to this goal is (sad to say that) cost! So a less expensive solution should be an advantage for animal wellbeing and research is needed to find the "normal values" for different species
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