AUTOMATED SYSTEM FOR BODY-SURFACE POTENTIAL MAPPING.

The term body-surface potential mapping (BSPM) refers to the recording of multiple time-coherent electrocardiographic potentials as they appear on the body-surface. This paper describes an automated system for the acquisition and processing of multiple electrocardiograms (ECGs) that solves most of the technical problems inherent in BSPM and is particularly suited to use in coronary care units. The minicomputer based acquisition system is a 128 channel device that records multiplexed and digitized ECGs on industry-compatible magnetic tape continuously for up to 4 minutes. Special purpose software was developed that enables data acquisition at the rate of 80 K bytes per second and provides each record on magnetic tape with information about the subject and the recording conditions. The processing system is a package of ECG analysis programs implemented on a general purpose computer; it performs event-detection, clustering of ECG complexes and noise and drift corrections on Frank leads. The remaining leads are averaged according to the Frank lead results.