A 8-month-old female Maltese dog was presented with a history of heart murmur. In physical examination, grade 4/6 systolic murmur heard at the left heart base. Electrocardiography showed sinus arrhythmia, right axis deviation, deep S wave and splintered QRS complex. Thoracic radiography revealed enlarged right side heart and bulging of the main pulmonary artery. Echocardiography showed mild hypertrophy of right ventricle, a supravalvular stenosis, marked post-stenotic dilation of the main pulmonary artery and a moderately increased pulmonary arterial velocity through the stenotic area (4.4 m/s, pressure gradient of 78.7 mmHg). The dog was diagnosed with supravalvular pulmonic stenosis based on the diagnostic imaging findings. Medical management using
DA-125, a new anthracycline antibiotic, showed antitumor activity against animal tumors and human tumors. Therefore we studied the cardiotoxic potential of DA-125 in hamsters and rats as a part of safety research, and compared it with that of doxorubicin(DXR). In acute cardiotoxicity test model used hamsters DA-125 was administered intravenously at a dose of 6, 9, 12 mg/kg, and DXR at 3 mg/kg was given. The electrocardiogram(ECG) of hamsters was recorded for 30 minutes after administration. The DA-125 caused slight ECG alterations at a dose of 6 mg/kg. At a dose of 12 mg/kg DA-125 induced moderate to remarkable changes in ECG like decrease of heart rate, widening of PR interval and 07 interval, and A-V block in 3 out of 5 animals. The severity of ECG alteration at 12 mg/kg of DA-125 was similar to that at 3mg/kg of DXR and these changes caused by DA-125 and DXR recovered within 10 minutes after injection. In chronic cardiotoxicity test model used rats, DA-125 was administered intravenously once a week for three weeks at a dose of 6, 9mg/kg and DXR was given at a dose of 6mg/kg. Electrocardiogram was recorded every week from the start of administration to 2 weeks after the last administration and the animals were sacrificed for histological heart examination at 1 week or 2 weeks after the last administration. DA-125 did not cause any abnormal changes in ECG and in histological heart examination due to administration, but DXR caused widening of ST segment, QRS complex, and QT interval from 1 week after administration and these changes were continued to necropsy. These alterations in ECG were accompanied by cardiac histological lesions such as vacuolation in myocardiac cells, interstitial edema and necrosis of myocytes. These results suggest that DA-125 is less cardiotoxic than DXR.
The functional wireless sensor node for u-healthcare application was developed. The developed sensor node can check the abnormality of ECG in some simple software in ROM of microprocess in the sensor node. The ECG signal is one of very important health signal form human body, and wavelike signal which is sampled as a sampling frequency between 100 and 400 Hz for digitalization, so the wireless data dor ECG signal is some heavy in Zigbee communication. Thus the sensor send the ECG signal to other sensor nodes or base station when it find abnormality in ECG signal is key technology to reduce the traffic between sensor nodes in wireless sensor network for u-healthcare, The sensor node does not need to transmit ECG data all time in wireless sensor network and to server. Using these sensor nodes, the healthcare system can dramatically reduce wireless data packet overload, the power consumption of battery in the sensor nodes and thus increase the reliability of the wireless system.
Atrial fibrillation is needed to be detected at paroxysmal stage and to be treated. But, paroxysmal atrial fibrillation ECG is hardly obtained with 12-lead electrocardiographs but Holter systems. Presently, the averaged beat subtraction(ABS) method is solely used to estimate atrial fibrillatory waves even with somewhat large residual error. As an alternative, in this study, we suggested an ESAF(event-synchronous adaptive filter) based algorithm, in which the AF ECG was treated as a primary input and event-synchronous impulse train(ESIT) as a reference. And, ESIT was generated so to be synchronized with the ventricular activity by detecting QRS complex. We tested proposed algorithm with simulated AF ECGs and real AF ECGs. As results, even with low computational cost, this ESAF based algorithm showed better performance than the ABS method and comparable performance to algorithm based on PCA(principal component analysis) or SVD(singular value decomposition). We also proposed an expanded version of ESAF for some AF ECGs with multi-morphologic ventricular activities and this also showed reasonable performance. Ultimately, with Holter systems including our proposed algorithm, atrial activity signal can be precisely estimated in real-time so that it will be possible to calculate atrial fibrillatory rate and to evaluate the effect of anti-arrhythmic drugs.
ECG signals are often contaminated with high-frequency noise such as muscle artifact, power line interference, and others. In the ECG signal processing, especially during a pre-processing stage, numerous noise removal techniques have been used to reduce these high-frequency noise without much distorting the original signal. This paper proposes a new type of digital filter with a continuously variable cutoff frequency to improve the signal quality This filter consists of a cutoff frequency controller (CFC) and variable cutoff frequency lowpass filter (VCF-LPF). From the noisy input ECG signal, CFC produces a cutoff frequency control signal using the signal slew rate. We implemented VCF-LPF based on two new filter design methods called convex combination filter (CCF) and weight interpolation fille. (WIF). These two methods allow us to change the cutoff frequency of a lowpass filter In an arbitrary fine step. VCF-LPF shows an excellent noise reduction capability for the entire time segment of ECG excluding the rising and falling edge of a very sharp QRS complex. We found VCF-LPF very useful and practical for better signal visualization and probably for better ECG interpretation. We expect this new digital filter will find its applications especially in a home health management system where the measured ECG signals are easily contaminated with high-frequency noises .
The Holter monitoring system is a widely used noninvasive diagnostic tool for ambulatory patient who may be at risk from latent life-threatening cardiac abnormalities. In this paper, we design a high performance intelligent holter monitoring system which is characterized by the small-sized and the low-power consumption. The system hardware consists of one-chip microcontroller(68HC11E9), ECG preprocessing circuit, and flash memory card. ECG preprocessing circuit is made of ECG preamplifier with gain of 250, 500 and 1000, the bandpass filter with bandwidth of 0.05-100Hz, the auto-balancing circuit and the saturation-calibrating circuit to eliminate baseline wandering, ECG signal sampled at 240 samples/sec is converted to the digital signal. We use a linear recursive filter and preprocessing algorithm to detect the ECG parameters which are QRS complex, and Q-R-T points, ST-level, HR, QT interval. The long-term acquired ECG signals and diagnostic parameters are compressed by the MFan(Modified Fan) and the delta modulation method. To easily interface with the PC based analyzer program which is operated in DOS and Windows, the compressed data, that are compatible to FFS(flash file system) format, are stored at the flash memory card with SBF(symmetric block format).
The electrocardiographic (ECG) parameters on unipolar precordial chest leads in the normal Korean native goat of 343 heads as to CV$_{6}$LU, CV$_{6}$LL CV$_{6}$RU, CV$_{6}$RL and V10 have been measured with a 3-channel Elertrocardiograph and computed, analysed. All wave types as positive, negatives biphasic and flatting in the P and T waves appeared in all leads but any special wave type was not shown more than 60%. Average amplitudes with the highest frequent rate in P wave were 81.4
The wall shear stress in the vicinity of end-to end anastomoses under steady flow conditions was measured using a flush-mounted hot-film anemometer(FMHFA) probe. The experimental measurements were in good agreement with numerical results except in flow with low Reynolds numbers. The wall shear stress increased proximal to the anastomosis in flow from the Penrose tubing (simulating an artery) to the PTFE: graft. In flow from the PTFE graft to the Penrose tubing, low wall shear stress was observed distal to the anastomosis. Abnormal distributions of wall shear stress in the vicinity of the anastomosis, resulting from the compliance mismatch between the graft and the host artery, might be an important factor of ANFH formation and the graft failure. The present study suggests a correlation between regions of the low wall shear stress and the development of anastomotic neointimal fibrous hyperplasia(ANPH) in end-to-end anastomoses. 30523 T00401030523 ^x Air pressure decay(APD) rate and ultrafiltration rate(UFR) tests were performed on new and saline rinsed dialyzers as well as those roused in patients several times. C-DAK 4000 (Cordis Dow) and CF IS-11 (Baxter Travenol) reused dialyzers obtained from the dialysis clinic were used in the present study. The new dialyzers exhibited a relatively flat APD, whereas saline rinsed and reused dialyzers showed considerable amount of decay. C-DAH dialyzers had a larger APD(11.70
The wall shear stress in the vicinity of end-to end anastomoses under steady flow conditions was measured using a flush-mounted hot-film anemometer(FMHFA) probe. The experimental measurements were in good agreement with numerical results except in flow with low Reynolds numbers. The wall shear stress increased proximal to the anastomosis in flow from the Penrose tubing (simulating an artery) to the PTFE: graft. In flow from the PTFE graft to the Penrose tubing, low wall shear stress was observed distal to the anastomosis. Abnormal distributions of wall shear stress in the vicinity of the anastomosis, resulting from the compliance mismatch between the graft and the host artery, might be an important factor of ANFH formation and the graft failure. The present study suggests a correlation between regions of the low wall shear stress and the development of anastomotic neointimal fibrous hyperplasia(ANPH) in end-to-end anastomoses. 30523 T00401030523 ^x Air pressure decay(APD) rate and ultrafiltration rate(UFR) tests were performed on new and saline rinsed dialyzers as well as those roused in patients several times. C-DAK 4000 (Cordis Dow) and CF IS-11 (Baxter Travenol) reused dialyzers obtained from the dialysis clinic were used in the present study. The new dialyzers exhibited a relatively flat APD, whereas saline rinsed and reused dialyzers showed considerable amount of decay. C-DAH dialyzers had a larger APD(11.70
Although it has been well known that ventricular fibrillation is the most important complication during hypothermia, much investigation has failed to show the exact nature of the etiology of ventricular fibrillation. Recently, there has been considerable research on the relationship between sympathetic activity and ventricular fibrillation under hypothermia. Cardiac muscle normally contains a certain amount of norepinephrine and the dramatic effect of this catecholamines on the cardiac muscle is well documented. It is, therefore, conceivable that cardiac catecholamines might exert an influence on the susceptibility of heart muscle to tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation and arrhythmia, under hypothermia. Hypothermia itself is stress enough to increase tonus of sympatheticoadrenal system. The normal heart is supplied by an autonomic innervation and is subjected to action of circulating catecholamines which may be released from the heart. If the reaction of the heart associated with a variable amount of cardiac catecholamines is. permitted to occur in the induction of hypothermia, the action of this agent on the heart has not to be differentiated from the direct effects of cooling. The studies presented in this paper were designed to provide further information about the cardio-physiological effects of reduced body temperature, with special reference to the role of catecholamines in ventricular fibrillation. Healthy cats, weighing about 3 kg, were anesthetized with pentobarbital(30 mg/kg) intraperitoneally. The trachea was intubated and the endotracheal tube was connected to a C.F. Palmer type A.C. respirator. Hypothermia was induced by immersing the cat into a ice water tub and the rate of body temperature lowering was