Non-invasive cardiopulmonary monitor for mice

描述(由申请人提供)：对小鼠生理性心肺节律长期变化的研究正在迅速扩大。原因是，有越来越多的小鼠品系已经被基因工程改造，以检验关于控制这些生物节奏的细胞过程的分子机制的科学假设。由于小鼠很小，传统的记录系统需要重大改进(留置血管导管)或根本不适用(皮肤电极)。 建议开发一种非侵入性传感器系统，用于连续和可靠地监测小鼠的呼吸频率、心率和可能的血压趋势。该传感器基于光纤耦合器传感器技术，该技术已在许多应用中证明了其对人体生理监测的适用性。这项传感器技术在初步实验中显示出了令人振奋的结果，它非常敏感，而且尺寸可扩展。 传感器系统的设计，一旦使用“合成”小鼠进行了优化，将在8-10只小鼠身上进行测试，这些小鼠已经安装了小鼠研究界常用的EKG监测系统。 将使用包括小波变换在内的不同算法来分析数据并评估该方法的可靠性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The study of long-term variation in physiological cardiopulmonary rhythms in mice is rapidly expanding. The reason is that there are an ever-increasing number of strains of mice that have been genetically engineered to test scientific hypotheses about the molecular mechanisms of the cellular processes that control these biological rhythms. Since mice are so small, conventional recording systems need significant modification (indwelling vascular catheters) or are not applicable at all (skin electrodes). The development of a non-invasive sensor system for the continuous and reliable monitoring of respiratory rate, HR, and possibly blood pressure trends in mice is proposed. The sensor is based on a fiber-optic coupler sensor technology that has proven its applicability to physiological monitoring in humans in a number of applications. The sensor technology, which showed promising results in preliminary experiments, is very sensitive and scalable in size. The design of the sensor system, once it has been optimized using a "synthetic" mouse, will be tested on 8-10 mice that have been fitted with an EKG monitoring system commonly used in the mouse research community. The data will be analyzed and the reliability of the approach assessed using different algorithms, including wavelet transforms.