IEEE transactions on bio-medical engineering
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IEEE Trans Biomed Eng · Jan 2012
Fascicle-selectivity of an intraneural stimulation electrode in the rabbit sciatic nerve.
The current literature contains extensive research on peripheral nerve interfaces, including both extraneural and intrafascicular electrodes. Interfascicular electrodes, which are in-between these two with respect to nerve fiber proximity have, however, received little interest. In this proof-of-concept study, an interfascicular electrode was designed to be implanted in the sciatic nerve and activate the tibial and peroneal nerves selectively of each other, and it was tested in acute experiments on nine anaesthetized rabbits. ⋯ Interfascicular electrodes could provide an interesting addition to the bulk of peripheral nerve interfaces available for neural prosthetic devices. Since interfascicular electrodes can be inserted without fully freeing the nerve and have the advantage of not confining the nerve to a limited space, they could, e.g., be an alternative to extraneural electrodes in locations where such surgery is complicated due to blood vessels or fatty tissue. Further studies are, however, necessary to develop biocompatible electrodes and test their stability and safety in chronic experiments.
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IEEE Trans Biomed Eng · Jan 2012
Weighted conditional random fields for supervised interpatient heartbeat classification.
This paper proposes a method for the automatic classification of heartbeats in an ECG signal. Since this task has specific characteristics such as time dependences between observations and a strong class unbalance, a specific classifier is proposed and evaluated on real ECG signals from the MIT arrhythmia database. This classifier is a weighted variant of the conditional random fields classifier. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms previously reported heartbeat classification methods, especially for the pathological heartbeats.
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IEEE Trans Biomed Eng · Jan 2012
An algorithm used for ventricular fibrillation detection without interrupting chest compression.
Ventricular fibrillation (VF) is the primary arrhythmic event in the majority of patients suffering from sudden cardiac arrest. Attention has been focused on this particular rhythm since it is recognized that prompt therapy, especially electrical defibrillation, may lead to a successful outcome. However, current versions of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) mandate repetitive interruptions of chest compression for rhythm analyses since artifacts produced by chest compression during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) preclude reliable electrocardiographic (ECG) rhythm analysis. ⋯ A total of 232 patients and 31,092 episodes of either VF or SR were accessed, in which 8195 episodes were corrupted by artifacts produced by chest compressions. We also compared the performance of this method with three other established algorithms, including VF filter, spectrum analysis, and complexity measurement. Even though there was a modest decrease in specificity and accuracy when chest compression artifact was present, the performance of this method was still superior to other reported methods for VF detection during uninterrupted CPR.