A portable spatial monitoring system for autonomous heart diagnosis

Abstract

Heart disorders are one of the most problematic issues of human health. There are currently many efforts to reduce the time for first assistance based on electronic systems that continuously records the electric heart activity for further inspection and anomalies detection. The most popular are portable monitoring systems based on the Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. However, an efficient detection of heart problems still being a big challenge mainly due to the difficulty of accessing some specific cardiac problems and signal variations between different patients. A different technique for heart diagnosing is based on spatial recording of electrical heart activity, commonly known as Vectorcardiogram (VCG). VCG is pointed by several authors as a more efficient tool than ECG for heart inspection and problem detection. This research explores the possibility of using VCG signals in a portable device for constant heart monitoring and injuries detection. It is presented a portable solution with VCG recording and digital signal processing for automatic diagnosis. This paper covers the aspects of the VCG signal and its ability to be converted into a 12-lead ECG signal. It is also presented a system for automatic diagnosis based on VCG which is based on a multichannel portable hardware platform to support noise cancellation, parameter extraction and decision making algorithms.

Portable decision support system for heart failure detection and medical diagnosis

“…Nevertheless, for an automatic decision making process, the ECG signal by itself do not offers the entire picture of electrical signal distribution on the heart. To overcome this lack, this project uses multichannel acquisition based on Vectorcardiogram (VCG) signal that provides a larger range of choices when compared to ECG, which offers the possibility to deeper evaluate heart injuries as referred in a previous work [9]. Also with VCG it is possible to obtain the ECG, Figure 4 shows an example of a VCG signal collected with the system.…”

Heart Sounds Parameter Extraction for Automatic Diagnosis

“…It is important to refer that for efficient signal segmentation the heart sounds needs to be clean from external noise sources. For this it can be used adaptive algorithms for denoising as the ones already used in previous works [5] [6].…”