Improving respiratory outcomes after pediatric cardiac surgery: new uses for nitric oxide.

Nitric oxide has been used to treat respiratory failure in post-pediatric cardiac surgical patients. High frequency oscillator ventilation is used to rescue infants who have failed conventional ventilation. In this issue a study is presented showing the benefit of combining these two therapies for improved outcomes in infants with hypoxic respiratory failure after congenital heart surgery

Shock Signal Trend Term Error Correction Method Based on Discrete Wavelet Transform and Low-Frequency Oscillator Combination

Shock response spectrum (SRS), calculated according to shock loading signal, is the primary metric for assessing the shock resistance ability of shipborne equipment. Nevertheless, the measured shock acceleration signal contains a trend term error that severely distorts the low frequency of the SRS. The accuracy of present correction methods cannot be assured due to a lack of reference. A discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and low-frequency oscillator combination method is proposed for correcting shock signals in this paper. The optimal wavelet parameters can be selected according to a low-frequency spectrum baseline fitted by the measured relative displacement to reject low-frequency trend term errors. Shock machine test results show that the average difference between the low-frequency spectrum baseline and uncorrected SRS is reduced from 89.8% to 3.2%, while the SRS slope rolled off to 5.8 dB/oct after imposing the proposed correction. The corrected SRS can faithfully show the actual shock loading characteristics of shipborne equipment in shock tests.

Noise Floor Reduction in Frequency Delta-Sigma Modulation Microphone Sensors

Frequency delta-sigma modulator (FDSM) employing a variable frequency oscillator is a novel replacement of the classical delta-sigma modulators. This is advantageous for application to sensors, because an ADC can be intrinsically integrated with the sensors. We have already proposed to use this technique to various sensors. However, the signal-to-noise ratio was significantly degraded by noise floor, in the previous papers. In this paper, we have investigated the origin of the noise floor in the FDSM microphone sensors as a promising example. It was demonstrated that improving the phase noise of the oscillator can drastically reduce the noise floor. For this reduction we improved the Q-factor of the cavity resonator, and the design of the oscillator circuit. With these improvements, the phase noise, and, hence, the noise floor, were improved by approximately 40 dB. In addition, we obtained an SNR of 57 dB for 114 dBSPL sound input with 96 kHz bandwidth, which corresponds to the dynamic range of 87 dB for maximum 140 dBSPL. A much larger dynamic range of around 120 dB is expected by increasing the sampling rate and decreasing the Al diaphragm thickness. These results also indicate the promise of the FDSM to varieties of physical sensors.