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Most of the conventional electrocardiowaphs foil to detect signals other than P-QRS-T due to the limited SNR and bandwidth. High-resolution electrocardiography(HRECG) provides better SNR and wider bandwidth for the detection of micro-potentials with higher frequency components such as vontricular late potentials(LP). We have developed a HRECG using uncorrected XYZ lead for the detection of LPs. The overall gain of the amplifier is 4000 and the bandwidth is 0.5-300Hz without using 60Hz notch filter. Three 16-bit A/D converters sample X, Y, and Z signals simultaneously with a sampling frequency of 2000Hz. Sampled data are transmitted to a PC via a DMA-controlled, optically-coupled serial communication channel. In order to further reduce the noise, we implemented a signal averaging algorithm that averaged many instances of aligned beats. The beat alignment was carried out through the use of a template matching technique that finds a location maximizing cross-correlation with a given beat tem- plate. Beat alignment error was reduced to ±0.25ms. FIR high-pass filter with cut-off frequency of 40Hz was applied to remove the low frequency components of the averaged X, Y, and Z signals. QRS onset and end point were determined from the vector magnitude of the sigrlaIL and some parameters needed to detect the existence of LP were estimated The entire system was designed for the easy application of the future research topics including the optimal lead system, filter design, new parameter extraction, etc. In the developed HRECG, without signal averaging, the noise level was less than 5uV. With signal averaging of at least 100 beats, the noise level was reduced to 0.5UV, which is low enough to detect LPs. The developed HRECG will provide a new advanced functionality to interpretive ECG analyzers.
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