Scientists Develop Ways of Detecting Heart Attack
German researchers have come up with a new generation of defibrillators (除颤器) and early-warning software aimed at offering heart patients greater protection from sudden death from cardiac arrest (心脏骤停).
In Germany alone around 100,000 people die annually as a result of cardiac arrest and many of these cases are caused by disruption to the heart"s rhythm. Those most at risk are patients who have already suffered a heart attack, and for years the use of defibrillators has proved useful in diagnosing life-threatening disruptions to heart rhythms and correcting them automatically by intervening within seconds. These devices take on a range of functions, such as that of pacemaker.
Heart specialists at Freiburg"s University Clinic have now achieved a breakthrough with an implanted defibrillator capable of generating a six-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) within the body. This integrated system allows early diagnosis of acute blood-flow problems and a pending (潜在的) heart attack. It will be implanted in patients for the first time this year. Meanwhile, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Mathematics in Kaiserslautern have developed a new computer software that renders the evaluation of ECG data more precise.
The overwhelming majority of patients at risk will not have an implanted defibrillator and must for this reason undergo regular ECGs. "Many of the current programs only take into account a linear correlation of the data. We are, however, use of a non-linear process that reveals the chaotic patterns of heart beats as an open and complex system," Hagen Knaf says. "In this way changes in the heart beats over time can be monitored and individual variations in patients taken into account." An old study of ECG data, based upon 600 patients who had suffered a subsequent heart attack, enabled the researchers to compare risks and to show that the new software evaluates the data considerably better. Scientists Develop Ways of Detecting Heart AttackThe new computer software is designed by a German Company.