A DIAGNOSTIC CATHETER WITH MEMORY

摘要

A catheter assembly having a catheter (100) with at least one transducer (110) associated therewith for directly measuring physiological parameters of a patient or measuring an amount of a parameter indicative of a physiological condition of the patient and a memory (102) which resides at a predetermined location on said catheter (100). The memory (102) contains encoded calibration information for calibrating the transducers (110) and encoded patient specific information which can be accessed by an external processing system to which the catheter assembly is connected for processing. The memory (102) is further designed such that disconnection of the catheter assembly from the external processing system does not cause values stored in the memory to be lost so that the patient specific information need not be reentered into the memory when the catheter assembly is reconnected to the same or another external processing system. By so providing the catheter assembly with memory (102), information for factory calibration, patient calibration and historical patient data may be stored with the catheter (100) for ease of use. The data in the memory (102) may also be coded to prevent easy replication of the catheter (100) by a competing manufacturer.