Development of a practical and effective technique to determine the complete level of autonomic neural activity during stress

Clinical evidence exists to suggest that an individual\u27s level of stress contributes to the state of many physiological and psychological disorders, The autonomic nervous system, by adjusting parasympathetic and sympathetic activity, is attributed with the control over an individual\u27s level of neural stress. Therefore, it is desired to develop a better and quantitative understanding of the stress! autonomic system mechanism. Previous work has been done to gain a partial understanding of such activity. The primary objective for this study is to complement and advance the previous work by determining whether there is other physiological data which could reveal more about the correlation between autonomic neurological activity and illness or disease. The work in this study was designed to identify a valid procedure for quantifying relative stress levels. Furthermore, it includes the objective to be useful for clinical and commercial application. This requires that the equipment be inexpensive, and the method simple to implement, non-invasive, straightforward to interpret, and yield accurate results. A method which uses a Photoplethysmograph to measure blood volume in the fingertip was selected. A lap-top computer with Lab VIEW software was used to acquire, display, store and process that data. An experimental protocol which was designed to change the stress level in test subjects was executed. The method devised effectively met the objectives for clinical! commercial development. Preliminary results indicate that the acquired data is useful and may be processed to readily quantify relative changes in blood volume. This technique effectively complements other methods which provide information about parasympathetic activity. With some enhancement, this technique may be developed to obtain information about both sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, all at the same time

Development and evaluation of a novel, real time mobile telesonography system in management of patients with abdominal trauma: study protocol

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Despite the use of e-FAST in management of patients with abdominal trauma, its utility in prehospital setting is not widely adopted. The goal of this study is to develop a novel portable telesonography (TS) system and evaluate the comparability of the quality of images obtained via this system among healthy volunteers who undergo e-FAST abdominal examination in a moving ambulance and at the ED. We hypothesize that: (1) real-time ultrasound images of acute trauma patients in the pre-hospital setting can be obtained and transmitted to the ED via the novel TS system; and (2) Ultrasound images transmitted to the hospital from the real-time TS system will be comparable in quality to those obtained in the ED.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Study participants are three healthy volunteers (one each with normal, overweight and obese BMI category). The ultrasound images will be obtained by two ultrasound-trained physicians The TS is a portable sonogram (by Sonosite) interfaced with a portable broadcast unit (by Live-U). Two UTPs will conduct e-FAST examinations on healthy volunteers in moving ambulances and transmit the images via cellular network to the hospital server, where they are stored. Upon arrival in the ED, the same UTPs will obtain another set of images from the volunteers, which are then compared to those obtained in the moving ambulances by another set of blinded UTPs (evaluators) using a validated image quality scale, the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS).</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Findings from this study will provide needed data on the validity of the novel TS in transmitting live images from moving ambulances to images obtained in the ED thus providing opportunity to facilitate medical care of a patient located in a remote or austere setting.</p