Journal of medical engineering & technology
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Photoplethysmogram (PPG) measures have been proven useful for the quantification of sympathetic reactivity and continuous monitoring of vascular reactivity. This study was designed to delineate the influence of respiratory rate on the variability of various PPG characteristics in time and frequency domains. PPG, electrocardiogram (ECG) and respiration were simultaneously recorded for 2 min from eight healthy volunteers during paced respiration of 6, 12 and 18 cycles min(-1). ⋯ The maximal spectral powers of the variability of all PPG measures were centred on the respiratory frequency in frequency domain. In conclusion, the results that the amplitude and slope in time domain are not altered by the respiratory frequency suggest their application in faithful assessment of cardiovascular reactivity. As the variability of PPI, T(decay) and PTT are altered by the slow respiration, the influence of respiration on these time derivatives should not be ignored during interpretation of vascular reactivity.
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Heart rate variability (HRV) is traditionally derived from RR interval time series of electrocardiography (ECG). Photoplethysmography (PPG) also reflects the cardiac rhythm since the mechanical activity of the heart is coupled to its electrical activity. Thus, theoretically, PPG can be used for determining the interval between successive heartbeats and heart rate variability. ⋯ The error analysis also showed insignificant differences between the HRV indices obtained by the two methods. Bland-Altman analysis showed high degree of agreement between the two methods for all the parameters of HRV. Thus, HRV can also be reliably estimated from the PPG based PP interval method.
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Compression of electrocardiography (ECG) is necessary for efficient storage and transmission of the digitized ECG signals. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has recently emerged as a powerful technique for ECG signal compression due to its multi-resolution signal decomposition and locality properties. This paper presents an ECG compressor based on the selection of optimum threshold levels of DWT coefficients in different subbands that achieve maximum data volume reduction while preserving the significant signal morphology features upon reconstruction. ⋯ In order to assess the performance of the proposed compressor, records from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database were compressed at different distortion levels, measured by the percentage rms difference (PRD), and compression ratios (CR). The method achieves good CR values with excellent reconstruction quality that compares favourably with various classical and state-of-the-art ECG compressors. Finally, it should be noted that the proposed method is flexible in controlling the quality of the reconstructed signals and the volume of the compressed signals by establishing a target PRD and a target CR a priori, respectively.
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Heart rate variability refers to the regulation of the sinoatrial node, the natural pacemaker of the heart by the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. Heart rate variability is important because it provides a window to observe the heart's ability to respond to normal regulatory impulses that affect its rhythm. A computer-based intelligent system for analysis of cardiac states is very useful in diagnostics and disease management. ⋯ Ranges of these parameters for various cardiac abnormalities are presented with an accuracy of more than 95%. Among the two entropies, ApEn showed better performance for all the cardiac abnormalities. Typical Poincare and recurrence plots are shown for various cardiac abnormalities.
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One of the most sensitive indices of myocardial contractility is represented by the rate of increase of intraventricular pressure during isovolumetric contraction (dP/dt) and (dP/dt(ejc)), which represents the rate of change of pressure during ejection. Today these parameters can be obtained only by invasive catheterization methods. We developed a novel technique that leads to the non-invasive reconstruction of the central aortic pressure. The technique is based on the concept of applying multiple successive occlusive pressures on the brachial artery from peak systole to diastole using an inflatable cuff and plotting the values against time intervals. The hypothesis is that the time intervals required for the aortic pressure wave to overcome a given occlusive brachial pressure applied by a sphyngomanometer on the arm are equal to time needed to reach the same pressure in the central aorta plus the propagation time to the brachial point, which is constant in the same patient throughout the measurements. ⋯ A newly developed method of non-invasive measurement of central dP/dt has been found to correlate to invasive measurements in an animal model.