Search

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a representative signal containing useful information about the condition of the heart. The shape and size of the P-QRS-T wave, the r-r interval, etc., may help to identify the nature of disease afflicting the heart. However, human observer cannot directly monitor these subtle details and it is difficult to evaluate the cardiac health using ECG alone. Hence, the fusion of ECG, blood pressure, saturated oxygen content and respiratory data for achieving improved clinical diagnosis of patients in cardiac care units. In this study, a computer based analysis and display of the heterogeneous signals for the detection of life threatening states is demonstrated using fuzzy logic based data fusion. And to evaluate the severity of the disease a new parameter, deterioration index is proposed and results are tabulated for various cases.

Digital watermarking is a technique of hiding specific identification data for copyright authentication. Most of the medical images are compressed by joint photographic experts group (JPEG) standard for storage. The watermarking is adapted here for interleaving patient information with medical images during JPEG compression, to reduce storage and transmission overheads. The text data is encrypted before interleaving with images in the frequency domain to ensure greater security. The graphical signals are also interleaved with the image. The result of this work is tabulated for a specific example and also compared with the spatial domain interleaving.