ECG Analysis for Veterinary Medicine

Client

Sydney Moise, Professor of Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine
Email: nsm2@cornell.edu

Advisors

Dr. Roberto Santilli, Visiting Professor of Medicine in the section of Cardiology
Ms. Shari Hemsley, LVT, Cardiology Technician

Note

This project team is now complete.

Project summary

The client is the leader of a research group that uses electrocardiography (ECG) to study the electrical activity of the heart. The research concentrates on dogs, but the results have applications to others species including the development of drugs for humans. The data is recorded in various ways, but the largest data sets come from a Holter Recorder, a wearable device which records 24 hours of ECG data.

Each data set is represented by a trace which plots electrical activity against time. Each beat of the heart creates a complex wave form with features that are identified by codes (R, P, Q, and T). The timing and amplitude of these features and the intervals between them provide clues about how the heart is functioning. The research group uses software from Forest Medical LLC of Syracuse to manage the data and provide some basic analyses, but the software is limited in the types of analysis. As a result, members of the group spend large amounts of time analyzing the data by hand.

The objective of this project is to provide a much richer set of tools for analyzing ECG traces. Initially the focus will be on tools that support the work of the Cornell group. The project team will need to observe the researchers to understand the analyses that are important for their research and translate the manual procedures into convenient and flexible computer algorithms. If time allows these tools will be applied in an important research project to measure a combination of features that is important in predicting the safety of new drugs.

Forest Medical is willing to provide an API to access the data, but this will need to be confirmed during the feasibility study. It is also possible that Forest Medical would want to incorporate the results of this project in future products.