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Master of Science / Department of Animal Sciences and Industry / Jeffrey S. Stevenson / The objectives were to evaluate the effects of equine chorionic gonadotropin (eCG) administration on preovulatory follicle diameter, serum estradiol and progesterone concentration, corpus luteum (CL) diameter, estrual activity, and pregnancy rate. Lactating dairy cows were submitted to a Presynch-Ovsynch timed artificial insemination (TAI) protocol. Cows (n = 121) in a single herd were treated with 2 injections of prostaglandin F2α (PGF) 14 d apart (Presynch), with the second injection administered 11 d before the onset of a timed AI protocol (Ovsynch; injection of GnRH 7 d before and 56 h after PGF2α, with TAI administered 16 to 18 h after the second GnRH injection). Cows were assigned randomly to receive either saline or 400 IU eCG concurrent with the PGF2α injection of the Ovsynch protocol (d 0). Blood samples were collected during the study to monitor serum changes in progesterone and estradiol to determine if eCG would facilitate increased estrual activity, improved ovulatory response to GnRH, and enhanced post-ovulatory luteal function. Administration of eCG tended to increase the number of CL and on d 9 and 16 after PGF2α, corresponding to d 6 and 13 post-ovulation. Volume of the post-eCG treatment luteal tissue was increased only on d 16. Timed AI pregnancy rates did not differ between eCG (36.9%) and control cows (41.8%). We concluded that use of eCG provided no profertility advantages to dairy cattle when programmed for a timed insemination at first service.

" Electroencephalogram (EEG), Electrocardiogram (ECG), and Electromyogram (EMG) bio-potential signals are commonly recorded in clinical practice. Typically, patients are connected to a bulky and mains-powered instrument, which reduces their mobility and creates discomfort. This limits the acquisition time, prevents the continuous monitoring of patients, and can affect the diagnosis of illness. Therefore, there is a great demand for low-power, small-size, and ambulatory bio-potential signal acquisition systems. Recent work on instrumentation amplifier design for bio-potential signals can be broadly classified as using one or both of two popular techniques: In the first, an AC-coupled signal path with a MOS-Bipolar pseudo resistor is used to obtain a low-frequency cutoff that passes the signal of interest while rejecting large dc offsets. In the second, a chopper stabilization technique is designed to reduce 1/f noise at low frequencies. However, both of these existing techniques lack control of low-frequency cutoff. This thesis presents the design of a mixed- signal integrated circuit (IC) prototype to provide complete, programmable analog signal conditioning and analog-to-digital conversion of an electrophysiologic signal. A front-end amplifier is designed with low input referred noise of 1 uVrms, and common mode rejection ratio 102 dB. A novel second order sigma-delta analog- to-digital converter (ADC) with a feedback integrator from the sigma-delta output is presented to program the low-frequency cutoff, and to enable wide input common mode range of ¡Ãƒâ€œ0.3 V. The overall system is implemented in Jazz Semiconductor 0.18 um CMOS technology with power consumption 5.8 mW from ¡Ãƒâ€œ0.9V power supplies. "

Superovulation of donor cows, embryo transfer, and estrus synchronization of recipients are widely used technologies in the purebred cattle industry. Progress continues to be made to achieve efficient and economic use of these technologies. The first retrospective study was conducted to compare embryo production between a stimulation protocol using only Folltropin as the gonadotropin, and a stimulation protocol using Folltropin and Pluset. Beefmaster donor cows (n=12) were stimulated using both protocols over two stimulated cycles, one protocol each cycle. Both protocols used the same synchronization protocol with only the gonadatropin injections differing. The control protocol (Folltropin protocol) consisted of seven Folltropin injections over the course of 3.5 days. The treatment protocol (Folltropin + Pluset protocol) consisted of four Folltropin injections followed by three Pluset injections over the course of 3.5 days. The mean numbers of viable embryos did not differ between treatments (P>0.01) and were 9.33 and 6.58 for the control and treatment protocols, respectively. The proportion of viable embryos to total ova for each protocol was 0.49 and 0.48 for the control and treatment protocols, respectively (P > 0.10). No significant difference on embryo production was observed between the control and treatment protocols. The second retrospective study was performed to compare pregnancy rates after embryo transfer between Beefmaster recipients who received eCG during synchronization and recipients who did not receive eCG during synchronization. Due to the conditions of this study, statistical analysis could not be performed. Pregnancy rates are reported, but they are not statistically significant. Recipients in the control group (n=332) were synchronized with a protocol using a CIDR insert for seven days, a progesterone estradiol injection at the time of CIDR insertion, a prostaglandin (PG) injection at CIDR removal, and an estradiol injection the day after CIDR removal. Recipients in the treatment group (n=142) were synchronized using the same synchronization protocol as the control group, except eCG was administered five days after CIDR insertion. Pregnancy rates were 44.88 and 38.73 for the control and treatment groups, respectively. The addition of eCG to the synchronization protocol did not appear to be either beneficial or detrimental to pregnancy rate under the conditions of this study. In summary, the addition of Pluset to the stimulation protocol for donors was not detrimental to embryo production. The estrus synchronization protocol with eCG for recipients did not appear to be beneficial; however, a controlled studies are still warranted to further investigate the potential effects of recipient age, parity, body condition score, or breed effect on response to eCG.

Even though the sleep apnea breathing occurs during the sleep,but it also affects the daytime's physiological status.Since sleep apnea breathing increases the risk of getting cardiovascular diseases,sleep disordered breathing has attracted significant amount attention.Conventional diagnosis processes for sleep disorder breathing is complex and time-consuming,therefore many efforts have been made in developing simplified physiological signal feature to detect sleep disorder breathing.To simplify the process of diagnosis,this study uses the ECG signals to differentiate patients and healthy subjects.In addition to traditional HRV features,this study also test a newly proposed ECG feature called degree of spectrum concentration which characterizes the degree of periodicity of the ECG waveform. Our experimental results show that sleep apnea patients have higher degree of spectrum concentration than healthy subjects.This work also tests the mutliscale entropy of this degree of spectrum concentration signal.The results demonstrate that complexity of the degree of spectrum concentration signal of the patients is higher than that of the healthy subjects.Finally,our results also detect differences between different age groups.

Acute hypotensive episodes (AHE) is a critical event that can lead to irreversible organ damage and death in intensive care units (ICU). The goal of the 10 th annual PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge is to predict which ICU patients will experience AHE within a forecast window of one hour. In tackling this problem, most of the previous studies extract their features for AHE prediction from the time history of MAP, diastolic ABP and systolic ABP. In contrast, by exploring the interaction within the cardiovascular system, this work employs frequency domain approach. Toward this goal, this work proposes two feature sets: degree of concentration and energy from the spectrogram of the ECG and ABP signals. The mulstiscale entropy of these features have also been studied. The effectiveness of these features is statically investigated by comparing their means between the AHE and non AHI patient groups.

In our research we analyse electrocardiograms (ECG). The aim of this research is to apply the fractal dimension computing method to electrocardiograms, i.e. to create an algorithm, due to which it would be possible to get a few parameters describing ECG. Then, to check, whether the created the mathematical model for computing fractal dimension classify the possessed data. According to Hausdorf “capacity dimension” we compute and analyze “capacity coefficient”. The research of the plane “capacity coefficient” was carried out in this work (it is a fractal dimension, which was computed at the fixed dimension of the iterational window). The computing algorithm was made, with the help of which the ECG plane capacity coefficient was computed for 300 persons. When the initial information on the examined persons is known, the results are tried to be assessed from the mathematical, as well as medical, point of view.

Submitted by Isaac Francisco de Souza Dias (isaac.souzadias@ufpe.br) on 2015-05-21T18:58:22Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertação Versão 13.pdf: 3038068 bytes, checksum: d35211f8ce524e4409508e0a61f42c38 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-21T18:58:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertação Versão 13.pdf: 3038068 bytes, checksum: d35211f8ce524e4409508e0a61f42c38 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-01-30 / Este trabalho fala sobre o desenvolvimento de um protótipo de um sistema de aquisição de sinais de ECG e EMG, de baixo custo de fabricação, baixo consumo de energia e que se comunica via wireless, utilizando protocolo de comunicação Bluetooth, com dispositivos AndroidTM. O desenvolvimento desse protótipo teve como finalidade a monitorização, em tempo real, dos sinais de ECG e EMG de um indivíduo, durante a realização de atividades físicas. Neste equipamento procurou-se realizar o projeto dos amplificadores para sinais biológicos (ECG e EMG), que combinasse baixo consumo e portabilidade, ou seja, os componentes escolhidos para este trabalho objetivaram reduzir o tamanho do circuito. Além disso, a transmissão de dados via Bluetooth foi adequada para que esses dados fossem utilizados em um dispositivo AndroidTM (smartphone), gerando a oportunidade para uma nova gama de produtos, os quais possam integrar a tecnologia existente nos celulares modernos à tecnologia de instrumentação biomédica aplicada ao monitoramento remoto de sinais biológicos. Com o intuito de atingir esse objetivo, foram desenvolvidos os sistemas de controle e processamento, baseados na arquitetura RISC, amplificação e filtragem, fonte de alimentação e comunicação Bluetooth, integrados em duas placas de circuito impresso, ambas com dimensão de 3x5cm. O firmware do sistema de aquisição e o software de visualização, controle e armazenamento de sinal foram desenvolvidos com a finalidade de tornar compatível o sistema com a maioria dos dispositivos baseados no sistema operacional AndroidTM. O sistema foi testado, apresentando bom desempenho na transmissão de dados e boa estabilidade em relação ao armazenamento e controle do consumo de energia. Atualmente, este sistema vem sendo utilizado em projetos de pesquisa e dissertações de mestrado com a finalidade de identificar possíveis problemas ou adequações a serem realizadas, tanto ao nível de hardware como de software. Com o sistema validado muitas pessoas podem ser beneficiadas, pois esse equipamento une a praticidade e multifuncionalidade dos telefones AndroidTM com a tecnologia de aquisição e processamento de sinais biológicos.

Abstract Brugada syndrome is an inherited arrhythmia disorder that predisposes to sudden cardiac death. It is characterized by its distinct ECG pattern. The purpose of this thesis was to study the phenotype and genotype characteristics of subjects with Brugada syndrome type ECG. The first study population consisted of 2479 young male Air Force applicants and 542 healthy middle-aged subjects. The 12-lead ECG was analyzed to assess the prevalence and prognosis of Brugada pattern in Finnish population. The second population consisted of 168 patients with AF. The ECGs of the patients with family history of lone AF were analysed in order to characterize the ECG features of familial AF. The third population consisted of 200 patients with Brugada syndrome and their ECGs were analyzed for detection of distinct ECG characteristics. In a substudy, the H558R variant was genotyped and the clinical presentation of this variant was evaluated. The clinical characteristics were collected of 47 patients with induced Brugada ECG during fever or medication. The prevalence of type 2 or 3 Brugada ECG was 0.61% in the young population and 0.55% in the middle-aged Finnish population. In a retrospective analysis, none of the Brugada ECG carriers had died. In the AF study, the prevalence of type 2 or 3 Brugada ECG was significantly higher among the subjects with lone AF compared to the healthy controls (p < 0.001). Many of the Brugada ECG carriers had a family history (> 30% of first-degree relatives) of AF. In patients with Brugada syndrome, the prolonged QRS duration was associated with previous symptoms. The R allele carriers in H558R variant had a trend towards less symptoms (p = 0.067) and had less conduction disturbances in 12-lead ECG than the HH genotype carriers (p < 0.05 in all ECG analysis). Among the subjects with induced Brugada ECG, 51% exhibited arrhythmic symptoms during the medical condition that had provoked the ECG pattern. In conclusion, type 2 and 3 Brugada ECGs were found to be benign in the Finnish population since no mortality occurred during an extensive follow-up period. On the other hand, these ECG abnormalities seem to be a marker of familial AF. Among patients with the Brugada syndrome, a prolongation of QRS is associated with prior symptoms. The variant H558R R allele seems to be a protecting genetic modulator. Induced Brugada ECG is a medical emergency since the patients are at high risk of sudden cardiac death.

The Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a tool measuring the electrical activity of the heart, and it is extensively used for diagnosis and monitoring of heart diseases. The ECG signal reflects not only the heart activity but also many other physiological processes. The respiratory activity is a prominent process that affects the ECG signal due to the close proximity of the heart and the lungs. In this thesis, several methods for the extraction of respiratory process information from the ECG signal are presented. These methods allow an estimation of the lung volume and the lung pressure from the ECG signal. The potential benefit of this is to eliminate the corresponding sensors used to measure the respiration activity. A reduction of the number of sensors connected to patients will increase patients’ comfort and reduce the costs associated with healthcare. As a further result, the efficiency of diagnosing respirational disorders will increase since the respiration activity can be monitored with a common, widely available method. The developed methods can also improve the detection of respirational disorders that occur while patients are sleeping. Such disorders are commonly diagnosed in sleeping laboratories where the patients are connected to a number of different sensors. Any reduction of these sensors will result in a more natural sleeping environment for the patients and hence a higher sensitivity of the diagnosis.