Cardiac synchronised data acquisition and analysis of physiological variables

The problem of recording a wide range of biological signals with bandwidths ranging from fractions of one hertz for respiratory waveforms to kilohertz for sympathetic nerve activity is of fundamental importance in the physiological laboratory. Computer based hardware and software solutions for the problem of data acquisition display and analysis of experimental data are discussed and a flexible new instrument, capable of recording most physiological signals with high accuracy and significant levels of data reduction is presented. Integration of this instrument with a commercially available scientific software package ASYST/ASYSTANT leads to a low cost, simple to use solution to data acquisition in the physiological laboratory. Data acquisition problems from renal and cardiovascular research, demonstrating the flexibility and capabilities of this instrument are presented as examples.