Patent US 5,957,950

A system and method for performing balloon angioplasty treatment on a patient. The system includes a catheter for insertion into an artery of the patient, a balloon coupled to the catheter with the balloon expandable by fluid passed through the catheter in order to apply pressure to plaque lesions deposited on vascular tissue of the artery. The balloon includes a PVDF piezoelectric transducer for sensing acoustic emission signals generated by deformation of the plaque lesions and the vascular tissue. The acoustic emission signals can be analyzed by frequency analysis, time domain analysis and wavelet analysis followed by neural net correlation evaluation.