Clinical assessment of cardiovascular and autonomic function using virtual instrumentation

Abstract

An analysis of multiple physiological can enable the undertanding the physiological processes that occur in the heart and circulation at different conditions. Related information about the activity of the autonomic nervous system can be derived by analysis of these key physiological signals on a beato-heat basis. However, due the large amount of data and complex mathematical processing involved, manual analysis is prohibitive. The solution presented in this paper facilitates this procedure by performing the entire processing on a dedicated stand-alone PC-based virtual instrument incorporating existing medical equipment, a data acquisition board and a computer program to acquire and process the physiological signals. The automated virtual instrument was written using LabVIEW as the main platform. The techniques implemented include noninvasive measurements of cardiac performance using impedance cardiography, time and frequency domain analysis, invasive and non-invasive barorefex sensitivity assessment, and forearm blood flow measurements.