Pinciroli F, Pellegrini A, Falcetti G, Antognini F
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politechnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.
Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 1988 Jan-Feb;26(1):1-10. doi: 10.1016/0169-2607(88)90069-7.
The drop in hardware costs has fostered the widespread use of home-computer systems. Because of this situation, the home computer can be profitably employed in some highly specialized fields. We believe electrocardiographic instrumentation to be one such field. We have built an electrocardiomultigraphimeter (ECXGM), which can be considered as a development of the traditional electrocardiograph that performs some additional functions. Our prototype features vectorcardiography, polar coordinate tracing, automatic measurements between fiducial points selected by the user with a joystick and screen cursor and trace filing by patient on labelled floppy disks. The standard hardware consists of a Commodore 64 console, a monitor, two floppy disk drives and an Epson HI-80 plotter, all of which are readily available. The special hardware consists of an A/D converter, which receives the electrocardiographic signal downstream of the amplifying stage, which is a standard feature of any electrocardiograph. Prototype development mostly involved the software. Difficulties were posed by the limited resources available on home computers, an important point in view of the problem to be tackled. The solutions adopted are based on the use of assembler language and overloading techniques and minimizing the interconnections among the software modules defined in a compactly built program. The result is an instrument with significantly advanced clinico-scientific capabilities as compared to current electrocardiographic instruments. This fact, and the class of the hardware used and special software built, confer originality to this work. The new instrument ought to be especially suitable for the offices of cardiologists who have an interest in such capabilities, and for schools of electrocardiography.
硬件成本的下降促进了家用计算机系统的广泛使用。鉴于这种情况，家用计算机可在一些高度专业化领域得到有益应用。我们认为心电图仪器领域就是其中之一。我们构建了一台心电图多导仪（ECXGM），它可被视为传统心电图仪的一种发展，具备一些额外功能。我们的原型机具有向量心电图、极坐标描记、用户通过操纵杆和屏幕光标选择基准点之间的自动测量以及患者在带标签的软盘上进行描记存档等功能。标准硬件包括一台Commodore 64控制台、一台显示器、两个软盘驱动器和一台爱普生HI - 80绘图仪，所有这些都很容易获得。特殊硬件包括一个A/D转换器，它在放大阶段下游接收心电图信号，这是任何心电图仪的标准配置。原型开发主要涉及软件方面。鉴于要解决的问题，家用计算机可用资源有限带来了困难。所采用的解决方案基于使用汇编语言和重载技术，并尽量减少紧凑构建程序中定义的软件模块之间的互连。结果是一台与当前心电图仪器相比具有显著先进临床科学能力的仪器。这一事实，以及所使用的硬件类别和所构建的特殊软件，赋予了这项工作独特性。新仪器应该特别适合对这些功能感兴趣的心脏病专家办公室以及心电图学学校。
