Multitask coronary care unit—a distributed processing approach

Abstract

Automated analysis of abnormal cardiac rhythms for use in the real time ECG monitoring in intensive coronary care units (ICUs) has gained widespread recognition. As more and more tasks are being assigned to these units, the system's throughput requirements are increasing. Microprocessors with adequate computational power and intelligence have invaded the ICUs and are finding greater application. To meet the high throughput requirement, it is possible to integrate two or more microprocessors to work in parallel. One such approach as proposed and implemented is reported in this paper. The various tasks as assigned to the ICU are divided into two groups. The more basic task of continuous real time ECG monitoring is entrusted to the master processor of the master-slave configuration. The other jobs are then assigned to the slave. This approach helps to serve better the needs of the unibed coronary care. A major problem to which most researchers in this area have addressed themselves is the high rate of false positives (FPs) and false negatives (FNs) in the detection of QRS-complex of the ECG. Efforts are made here to design an algorithm for detecting QRS-complex with reduced FPs and FNs in the presence of noise and in spite of wide variations in the ECG.