Electro-optical recording system for myocardial ischemia studies in animal experiments

Myocardial ischemia is the most common cause of death in the developed countries. The most severe manifestation is sudden death due to electrical instability, terminating in ventricular fibrillation or heart arrest. This study is based on experiments in which electrograms and monophasic action potentials are recorded from isolated guinea pig hearts perfused according to Langendorff during various phases of acute ischemia and reperfusion. The data are then processed by a wavelet transform in order to obtain complex-valued time-frequency patterns.