Ballistocardiogram signal (BCG) is a non-invasive technique for the assessment of the cardiac function. It consists mainly of heart movement and the movement of blood in aorta, arteries, and periphery, which can be used to real-time monitor the heart rate and respiration frequency at home. In our laboratory, a sitting BCG detection chair has been designed successfully, and the acquisition and analysis system based on virtual instruments is proposed in this paper. MATLAB7.0 and LabVIEW8.5 were used to simulate the operational environment, and the results show high efficiency and accuracy in displaying waveform and spectrum, extracting main characteristics of heart rate and respiratory frequency, and alerting when abnormal heart-rate occurs.
Automatic multi-cycle analysis of cardiac function from real-time MRI
