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There is increasing interest in right ventricular function as an important determinant of cardiac output. However, the chamber is difficult to study, because of its shape and relationship to the left ventricle. Invasive studies, radionuclide studies and two-dimensional echocardiography are all useful approaches, but all have serious limitations. Systolic time intervals, best measured by pulsed Doppler ultrasound in the proximal pulmonary artery, offer one method of assessing right ventricular systolic function. Previous "normal" ranges, however, could be criticised on many counts. I present data from carefully checked normal controls and compare to previous publications, and explore variability and relationships between the various systolic time intervals. Most variables have skewed frequency distributions; the ranges are somewhat wider than previously described; most heart rate corrections are found to have serious limitations; and the effect of age is explored. Complete heart block offers a model to study the the effects of varying atrioventricular intervals whilst the ventricular rate is held unphysiologically steady by an artificial pacemaker. Given the current controversy about the merits of single- versus dual-chamber pacing, the issue is of topical interest also. The effect of varying the "P-R" interval within the physiological range is explored, and "optimal" ranges identified. A curious "nadir" effect, previously unknown, was discovered. When P waves followed paced QRS complexes at about 50-100ms, forward flow into the pulmonary artery (as judged from systolic time intervals) fell in most patients, and in some subjects virtually ceased. As a small included invasive part of the study showed, this was accompanied by falls in RV systolic pressure and rises in right atrial pressure. This study demonstrates that right ventricular systolic time intervals can be used to study right ventricular function in pacing situations, and is further evidence of the unsatisfactory nature of single-chamber ventricular pacing.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) system uses vehicle’s on-board sensors such as radar, LIDAR, camera, infrared, etc. to detect the potential collisions, alert the driver and make safety braking decision to avoid a potential collision. Its limitation is that it requires clear line-of-sight to detect what is in front of the vehicle. Whereas, in current V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle communication) systems, vehicles communicate with each other over a wireless network and share information about their states. Thus the safety of a V2V system is limited to the vehicles with communication capabilities. Our idea is to integrate the complementary capabilities of V2V and AEB systems together to overcome the limitations of V2V and AEB systems. In a V2V-AEB system, vehicles exchange data about the objects information detected by their onboard sensors along with their locations, speeds, and movements. The object information detected by a vehicle and the information received through the V2V network is processed by the AEB system of the subject vehicle. If there is an imminent crash, the AEB system alerts the driver or applies the brake automatically in critical conditions to prevent the collision. To make V2V-AEB system advance, we have developed an intelligent heart Monitoring system and integrated it with the V2V-AEB system of the vehicle. The advancement of wearable and implantable sensors enables them to communicate driver’s health conditions with PC’s and handheld devices. Part of this thesis work concentrates on monitoring the driver’s heart status in real time by using fitness tracker. In the case of a critical health condition such as the cardiac arrest of a driver, the system informs the vehicle to take an appropriate operation decision and broadcast emergency messages over the V2V network. Thus making other vehicles and emergency services aware of the emergency condition, which can help a driver to get immediate medical attention and prevent accident casualties. To ensure that the effectiveness of the V2V-AEB system is not reduced by a time delay, it is necessary to study the effect of delay thoroughly and to handle them properly. One common practice to control the delayed vehicle trajectory information is to extrapolate trajectory to the current time. We have put forward a dynamic system that can help to reduce the effect of delay in different environments without extrapolating trajectory of the pedestrian. This method dynamically controls the AEB start braking time according to the estimated delay time in the scenario. This thesis also addresses the problem of communication overload caused by V2V-AEB system. If there are n vehicles in a V2V network and each vehicle detects m objects, the message density in the V2V network will be n*m. Processing these many messages by the receiving vehicle will take considerable computation power and cause a delay in making the braking decision. To prevent flooding of messages in V2V-AEB system, some approaches are suggested to reduce the number of messages in the V2V network that include not sending information of objects that do not cause a potential collision and grouping the object information in messages.

Heart dysfunction is a worldly widespread problem that currently is one of the leading causes of death. Studies indicate that many deaths related to cardiac dysfunction could have been prevented if discovered early. Contemporarily, ultrasound and electrocardiography are indispensable modalities for diagnostic purposes and analysis of cardiac function. The Ventricorder is an Ultra-Wideband radar sensor manufactured by the Norwegian company Novelda. Ventricorder has been shown to be able detect heart movements and breathing but its actual clinical value remains to be investigated. The Cardiac State Diagram (CSD) is a pre-clinical software tool for visualization of the heart's mechanical function. The CSD is confirmed by pilot studies to be able to constitute a basis for diagnosis and cardiac function assessment. Theoretically, the CSD is well suited to be used with the Ventricorder since the Ventricorder detects small changes over time and information about time events is all that is required for the creation of a CSD. Contemporarily, ultrasound tissue velocity imaging (TVI) is usually used for production of CSDs and in this master thesis we examined if the Ventricorder can be used to produce CSDs. This was done by mainly comparing velocity data from the Ventricorder with velocity data from temporally synchronized apical four-chamber images acquired with ultrasound TVI. The results indicate that there is an apparent correlation between these data sets and the Ventricorder should therefore be able to produce data that could constitute the basis for the production of a CSD. What remain now is to confirm these results statistically with a larger test group and to investigate whether all the time instants needed for the production of a CSD can be identified objectively. / Hjärtdysfunktion är ett värdsligt utbrett problem som ligger bakom många dödsfall varje år. Studier har visat att många dödsfall som är relaterade till hjärtdysfunktion hade kunnat förebyggas om de upptäckts i tid. För närvarande är bland annat ultraljud och EKG oumbärliga metoder för diagnostisering och analys av hjärtfunktion. Ventricorder är en typ av radarsensor som utnyttjar ett brett frekvensspektrum, så kallat Ultra Wideband, och är tillverkad av det norska företaget Novelda. Ventricorder har visat sig kunna detektera exempelvis hjärtrörelser och andning men dess kliniska värde har ännu inte undersökts. Cardiac State Diagram (CSD) är ett prekliniskt mjukvaruverktyg för att visualisera hjärtats mekaniska funktion och som har bekräftats genom pilotstudier att kunna användas som underlag för diagnostik och bedömning av hjärtats funktion. Teoretiskt sett är CSD väl lämpat för att användas med Ventricordern eftersom Ventricordern registrerar små rörelser över tid och just ändringar över tid är precis vad som behövs för att skapa ett CSD. I dagsläget används vanligen vävnadsdoppler (TVI) för produktion av CSD och i denna masteruppsats undersöktes huruvida Ventricorder kan användas för att producera CSD. Detta gjordes genom att jämföra mätdata från Ventricorder med temporalt synkroniserade apikala fyrkammar-bilder framställda med vävnadsdoppler. Resultaten indikerar att det finns en påtaglig korrelation mellan dessa data och att mätdatat från en Ventricorder således bör kunna användas för produktion av CSD. Det kvarstår att bekräfta dessa resultat statistiskt med en större testgrupp och att undersöka om samtliga tidsmarkörer som behövs för produktion av ett CSD kan identifieras objektivt.