Scientists Develop Ways of Detecting Heart Attack

German researchers have come up with a new generation of defibrillators and early — warning software aimed at offering heart patients greater protection from sudden death from cardiac arrest.
In Germany alone around 100,000 people die annually as a result of cardiac arrest and many of these cases are caused by disruption to the heart’s rhythm. Those most at risk are patients who have already suffered a heart attack, and for years the use of defibrillators has proved useful in diagnosing life-threatening disruptions to heart rhythms and correcting them automatically by intervening within seconds. These devices take on a range of functions, such as that of pacemaker.
Heart specialists at Freiburg’s University Clinic have now achieved a breakthrough with an implanted defibrillator capable of generating a six — channel electrocardiogram (ECG) within the body. This integrated system allows early diagnosis of acute blood — flow problems and a pending heart attack. It will be implanted in patients for the first time this year. Meanwhile, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Mathematics in Kaiserslautern have developed new computer software that renders of ECG data more precise.
The overwhelming majority of patients at risk will not have an implanted defibrillator and must for this reason undergo regular ECGs. "Many of the current programs only take into account a linear correlation of the data. We are, however, making use of a non — linear process that reveals the chaotic patterns of heart beats as an open and complex system," Hagen Knaf says, "In this way changes in the heart beats over time can be monitored and individual variations in patients taken into account." An old study of ECG data, based upon 600 patients who had suffered a subsequent heart attack, enabled the researchers to compare risks and to show that the new software evaluates the data considerably better. [衛生類A]

科學家探索發現心臟病的方法

德國研究者們發明了新一代的除顫器和旨在為心臟病人提供更多保護，使他們免遭心臟停止導致的突然死亡的早期預報軟件。
僅在德國每年就有10萬人死于心臟停止。其中大部分是由于心律中斷導致的。危險最大的是那些已經犯過一次心臟病的病人。幾年來除顫器被證實在探測心律中止和在幾秒鐘內實施自動干涉以調整心律的診斷中是有用的。這種方法起到了很多作用，例如起搏器。