Trying to understand Author’s education. Have they done both Medicine & Engineering? Looking at their articles & github, they are sound in electro physiology, Anaesthesiology & software. Great intersection of knowledge.
[deleted]
Excitable cells
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: Excitable cells
#22I am reworking the analysis of ECGs from an old contest, and I want help from an expert.
In 2000 the Computers in Cardiology challenge (CINC2000) provided ECGs from sleep studies of 70 patients and asked contestants to identify obstructive sleep apnea based on those ECGs. I was on the team that won.
Now I am reworking the problem for the second edition of a book (see https://www.fraserphysics.com/book.pdf), and I see great variety in those ECGs (see https://www.fraserphysics.com/all_ecgs.pdf). I suspect that some of that variety is due to lead placement, and some is due to pathology, but I'm not sure.
Is anyone here willing to help me out?
Re: Excitable cells
#23Trying to understand Author’s education. Have they done both Medicine & Engineering? Looking at their articles & github, they are sound in electro physiology, Anaesthesiology & software. Great intersection of knowledge.
I don't know the author, but I will note that my cardiologist got an Electrical Engineering degree before going to medical school and views it as a huge advantage when dealing with the heart.
Re: Excitable cells
#24Oh this is interesting. Thanks!
I've survived ventricular fibrillation 3 times and have an implanted ICD. I never really understood why delivering high voltage shocks is that effective, and always have anxiety about "the time it won't work"
Re: Excitable cells
#25As someone who had their life upended last year upon discovering I had AVNRT, this article is much appreciated. I'm still trying to understand the root cause of my arrhythmia, because two ablations and one daily medication later and I still have regular episodes.
It's wild how many different types of arrhythmia there are, and how they can be connected to many other systems in the body. It seems like mine might be related to my nervous system.
Re: Excitable cells
#26I have frequent ectopic beats that I feel as a flutter / heavy beat on my chest. The doc says it won't kill me but it is extremely uncomfortable at times. This has been a great material to learn about the inner workings of heart cells. BTW Here's an ECG from my Apple Watch showing 3 such beats (you can't miss them): https://link.ekin.dev/l1Vc3Gdf If you happen to have these, just get checked out by a cardiologist. Th…
I had something similar for many years (triggered by an episode of afib brought-on by triggering my vagus nerve). The one thing that has helped me fully get rid of these (after YEARS of trial-and-error) was getting onto beta blockers (Propranolol). These have COMPLETELY gotten rid of my ectopic beats and also helped me deal with the health anxiety. If you ever want to talk, feel free to hit me up (contact info in pro…
Propranolol is such an underrated drug, or at-least it was when I first started using it twenty years ago (initially for hand tremors but I found it did more than settle just my hands). Glad others have been discovering its usefulness over the years.
I think they've even recently found use in cancer therapy [1].
Sir James Black the pharmacologist who developed it is an absolute legend [2].
1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2162402X.2023.2...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPe0sLghRBQ&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...
Re: Excitable cells
#27Learned about the heart today! Thank you! I wonder what other types of cells / tissues can be simulated by cellular automata?
I was thinking the same thing. I need more simulations like this!
Re: Excitable cells
#28I'm rarely intimidated by a textbook but I was intimidated by a set of cardiology books I saw at the vet school. The topological structure of waves in the heart is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_wave
because cardiac cells circle around a loop with phase from 0 to 2π, contrast that the usual oscillator which has position p and momentum q. An oscillation in that space can rotate around the center and look like a phase but it's also possible to go right through the center, whereas for cardiac excitations the p variable is on the unit circle. This astonishing book covers the topology of this kind of thing:
https://archive.org/details/geometryofbiolog0000winf/page/n9...
particularly the cases where you have just one phase (e.g. jet lag or cell division or plant phenology) but it applies as well to those spiral waves where every element in the medium has a phase.
Re: Excitable cells
#29Trying to understand Author’s education. Have they done both Medicine & Engineering? Looking at their articles & github, they are sound in electro physiology, Anaesthesiology & software. Great intersection of knowledge.
Thank you all for the interest in the article and the kind feedback.
I'm a medical doctor with an interest in engineering and coding. My PhD was quite focused on signal analysis and coding, and my supervisor is a medical engineer.
Re: Excitable cells
#30I had a benign irregular heartbeat (Premature Ventricular Contractions) for half my life. During one checkup the cardiologist said my heart had become enlarged to compensate, and if I wanted an energy boost I should get an ablation surgery.
The ablation was quite the experience as I was kept conscious throughout (and I felt euphoric thanks to the painkillers). A team of students carefully threaded a wire in through my femoral artery, guided it up to the inside of the heart and zapped the problematic cells. I could actually feel the moment they fixed it. One moment my rhythm was irregular, the next it was regular. They then ran a series of stress tests that included injecting me with something that pushed my heart rate above 200 bpm. That was uncomfortable. I was back to my normal routine 24 hours later and I did indeed have more energy.