• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.429-438
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• 1997

Mechanical valve is one of the most widely used implantable artificial organs of which the reliability is so important that its failure means the death of patient. Therefore early noninvasive detection is essentially required, though mechanical valve failure with thrombosis is the most common. The objective of this paper is to detect the thrombosis formation by spectral analysis and neural network. Using microphone and amplifier, we measured the sound from the mechanical valve which is attached to the pneumatic ventricular assist device. The sound was sampled by A/D converter(DaqBook 100) and the periodogram is the main algorithm for obtaining spectrum. We made the thrombosis models using pellethane and silicon and they are thrombosis model on the valvular disk, around the sewing ring and fibrous tissue growth across the orifice of valve. The performance of the measurment system was tested firstly using 1 KHz sinusoidal wave. The measurement system detected well 1KHz spectrum as expected. The spectrum of normal and 5 kinds of thrombotic valve were obtained and primary and secondary peak appeared in each spectrum waveform. We find that the secondary peak changes according to the thrombosis model. So to distinguish the secondary peak of normal and thrombotic valve quantatively, 3 layer back propagation neural network, which contains 7, 000 input node, 20 hidden layer and 1 output was employed The trained neural network can distinguish normal and valve with more than 90% probability. As a conclusion, the noninvasive monitoring of implanted mechanical valve is possible by analysing the acoustical spectrum using neural network algorithm and this method will be applied to the performance evaluation of other implantable artificial organs.