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Leadless wirelessly powered pacemaker for multi chamber pacing using miniaturized pacing and sensing node

While beat detection in a Cardiac Electrical Signal (CES) is a well-studied problem, we propose a novel algorithm for implementation in pacemakers that learns the heights and widths of atrial and ventricular peaks from processing a few seconds of cardiac data sampled at 1 kHz. This purely data-driven solution to learn the parameters of atrial and ventricular peaks will allow pacemakers to set their own detection parameters and adaptively tune the parameters over time for that specific patient. We have validated our algorithm on one minute of cardiac electrical signal data from 51 separate channels, coming from 17 electrodes connected directly to cardiac tissue on each of three separate animals. Additionally, we have implemented the algorithm on a Field Programmable Gate Array and tested it on an ex-vivo rat heart to illustrate that our algorithm can run in real-time on commodity hardware.

Texas Heart Institute (THI) was awarded a prestigious four-year, $2.39 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore further the development of a novel pacemaker system that is both leadless and wirelessly powered.

Mehdi Razavi, M.D., director of electrophysiology clinical research and innovations at THI, along with co-principal investigators, Kaiyuan Yang, Ph.D, and Behnaam Aazhang, Ph.D. who are on the faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, will lead the device development and research studies. The new pacemakers allow simultaneous pacing and sensing from multiple sites in the heart to help reduce the complications associated with the traditional pacemakers in use today.