Abstract
The chicken embryo is a widely used experimental animal model in many studies, including in the field of developmental biology, of the physiological responses and adaptation to altered environments, and for cancer and neurobiology research. The embryonic heart rate is an important physiological variable used as an index reflecting the embryo’s natural activity and is considered one of the most difficult parameters to measure. An acceptable measurement technique of embryonic heart rate should provide a reliable cardiac signal quality while maintaining adequate gas exchange through the eggshell during the incubation and embryonic developmental period. In this paper, we present a detailed design and methodology for a non-invasive photoplethysmography (PPG)-based prototype (Egg-PPG) for real-time and continuous monitoring of embryonic heart rate during incubation. An automatic embryonic cardiac wave detection algorithm, based on normalised spectral entropy, is described. The developed algorithm successfully estimated the embryonic heart rate with 98.7% accuracy. We believe that the system presented in this paper is a promising solution for non-invasive, real-time monitoring of the embryonic cardiac signal. The proposed system can be used in both experimental studies (e.g., developmental embryology and cardiovascular research) and in industrial incubation applications.
Highlights
The chicken embryo is an important product in the global demand for chicken meat but is a widely used experimental animal model in developmental biology research, the study of physiological responses and adaptation to altered environments, and neurobiology research [1,2,3].embryonic chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) assays have been widely used to study angiogenesis and tumour cell invasion metastasis
The manual search for the embryonic cardiac wave (ECW) showed that it is only possible to an ECW starting from embryonic day ED07 using the Egg-PPG prototype
ECW is detectable from ED07 until ED19 using a light intensity range within I = 150 to 300 mW·Sr that the ECW is detectable from ED07 until ED19 using a light intensity range within = 150 to 300 and amplification gain range within G = −50 to −100 dB
Summary
The chicken embryo is an important product in the global demand for chicken meat but is a widely used experimental animal model in developmental biology research, the study of physiological responses and adaptation to altered environments, and neurobiology research [1,2,3]. Unlike an electrocardiogram (ECG), which measures the heart rate by placing electrodes on the patient’s chest to measure electrical potential, PPG is a low cost, simple, non-invasive optical measurement based on the reflection of light and is used in the biomedical field to detect blood volume changes in the microvascular bed of tissue through red and infrared lights [9]. In their study [8], Lewin et al introduced a PPG-based technique to measure the chicken embryonic heart rate. We present a full description of a prototype of a non-invasive PPG-based system, including hardware and a real-time algorithm, for continuous long-term heart rate monitoring of the developing chicken embryo during incubation. The developed LED control board is provided with an external input terminal (0–5 DC-Voltage), which allows the user to externally control the LED’s current and regulate the LED’s intensity between 0 and 300 mW·Sr−1
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