Stefan Nivall

Chapter 10 Long-term EEG monitoring in neonatal and pediatric intensive care

Publisher Summary In an intensive care, a number of physiologic parameters are monitored. Therefore, many different pieces of equipment, each concerned with one or a few measurements are employed. Ideally, a monitoring system should be able to handle all signals on a common time basis so that they can be correlated during monitoring and studied in retrospect to summarize and evaluate the clinical course. Early diagnosis of central nervous system (CNS) damage or dysfunction is essential for determination of discontinuation of treatment, for judgment of the prognosis and information to parents, and for identification treatable pathophysiological processes where intervention can improve the prognosis. The chapter describes a new digital system for intensive care monitoring. The system provides high quality, long-term recordings under clinical outline conditions of pediatric surgery and intensive care. Till date, the system comprises cerebral monitoring (multi-channel EEG and CFM) and cardiovascular parameters (ECG, blood pressures and SaO2) on a common time base. As it is an open system, new functions can be added easily.

Image quality in digital chromosome analysis systems

This paper reports on an investigation into the differences in image quality of different components used in a digital image processing system for chromosome analysis. As chromosome aberrations are important tools in the cloning of genes, it is important to know if the introduction of computerized analysis systems increases the risk of missing small aberrations. In this investigation the number of visible bands on a number of chromosomes has been used as a measure of quality. The images compared are microscope ocular images, photographs from a microscope builtin camera, digital images from a high and from a standard resolution camera, presented both on screen and print‐out on paper. The main conclusions are that: (1) the view in the microscope ocular gives the best resolution, (2) there are risks of losing vital information using the digital image processing system for chromosome analysis, and (3) this risk is significantly reduced when using a high resolution camera.

Videodensiometric measurements in contrast-echocardiography: A quantitative method for the assessment of right ventricular function

This paper describes an automatic image analysis technique for the assessment of right ventricular function. It is based on contrast-echocardiography in conjunction with real-time video densiometry.