Heart pacing pulse detection system

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The general purpose of the present invention is a system including a process for enhancing detection of the pacing artifact in a patient having artificially paced myocardial contractions.
The detection is accomplished by sensing seven EKG leads.
Each lead provides a view of the heart from a different angle.
The multiple views of the heart is quite important due to the recent advances in artificially pacing the heart.
The recent advances now allow the heart to be artificially paced with very small and narrow amplitude pulses.
The pulses are now small enough where they are not detectable from the skin surface unless the vector of detection is correct.
This process relies on differentially amplifying the pulses separately and passing the pulses through a low pass filter.
The signals are not summed because several of the 7 leads may not have any signal present at all.
The effect of summing the 7 signals would be to just add noise to the good signals.
The pulses that are encountered can vary over 10,000 times in amplitude and several hundred times in width.
One detection level is no longer adequate for all of the possible pulse amplitudes and widths that could be encountered.
The process uses a closed loop technique to automatically determine the correct detection level.
Reliable detection of the pacing artifact is extremely important in monitoring and programming implantable pacemakers.
It is necessary to accurately determine whether and when a pacing pulse has occurred and the width of the pacing pulse.
The pacing artifact circuit is programmable.
The circuit has eight levels of detection that can be selected from the processor.
An algorithm is utilized to detect the noise level and the pacing artifact amplitude, and automatically select the right trigger level.
The system eliminates false pacing artifacts by utilizing the software qualification.
The principal is that if the hardware differentiator produces a signal due to noise or a pacing artifact, an interrupt is generated