Accuracy Validation of Urinary Flowmetry Technique Based on Pressure Measurement

Uroflowmetry is a non-invasive clinical test useful for screening benign prostatic hyperplasia(BPH) common in the aged men. The current standard way to obtain the urinary flow rate is to continuously acquire the urine weight signal proportional to volume over time. The present study proposed an alternative technique measuring pressure to overcome noise problems present in the standard weight measuring technique. Experiments were performed to simultaneously acquire both weight and pressure changes during urination of 9 normal men. Noise components were separated from volume signals converted from both weight and pressure signals based on the polynomial signal model. Signal-to-noise ratio was defined as the ratio of the energies between signal and noise components of the measured volume changes, which was 8.5 times larger in the pressure measuring technique, implying that cleaner signal could be obtained, more immune to noisy environments. When four important diagnostic parameters were estimated, excellent correlation coefficients higher than 0.99 were resulted with mean relative errors less than 5%. Therefore, the present pressure measurement seemed valid as an alternative technique for uroflowmetry.

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