On the U.N. International Day For Persons With Disabilities (Dec 3), Dr. Adrian Chan joins NOW with Dave Brown to talk about the work he and his colleagues do at Carleton University’s Abilities Living Laboratory (starting at 77:30).

Photo of Patrick Quesnel Figure showing an electrocardiogram Photo of Patrick Quesnel

patrick quesnel

gating false alarms for myocardial ischemia using biosignal quality analysis

Cardiac complications such as heart attacks may occur when a patient undergoes noncardiac surgery. Beta blockers have shown promise for mitigation of these cardiac complications but the Perioperative Ischemic Evaluation Study (POISE) has shown them to have had adverse effects when administered to patients that are not going to experience a complication. As a result, the Perioperative Ischemia Reduction Study (PROSE) is investigating the effects of beta blockers when administered solely to patients experiencing myocardial ischemia, which is a lack of oxygen flow to the heart and a precursor to myocardial infarction. Myocardial ischemia is detectable via slow changes in a patient's electrocardiogram (ECG); however current observation techniques render significant numbers of false alarms from the detection algorithms because of poor signal quality. This work seeks to implement quality analysis techniques in order to suppress alarms generated during periods of poor signal quality in order to increase specificity of the myocardial ischemia detection algorithms while still maintaining their sensitivity.

Thesis supervisors: Adrian D. C. Chan and Homer Yang (Head of Anaesthesiology, The Ottawa Hospital)

biography

Patrick Quesnel is currently working on his Master's of Applied Science in Biomedical Engineering at Carleton University. He received a Bachelor's of Engineering in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering with High Distinction in 2012 from Carleton University. He has interned at the Department of National Defence and Genzyme Diagnostics, which has since become Sekisui Diagnostics. He is currently co-chair of the Carleton University Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (CU@EMBS).

publications

  1. Quesnel P, Chan ADC, Yang H, "Evaluation of Real-Time Biosignal Quality Analysis for Ambulatory ECG with ST-Segment Deviations", 36th Conference of the Canadian Medical & Biological Engineering Society, Ottawa, Canada, 2013.
  2. Quesnel P, Chan ADC, Yang H, "Real-Time Biosignal Quality Analysis of Ambulatory ECG for Detection of Myocardial Ischemia", IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications, Ottawa, Canada, pp. 1-5, 2013.

Last updated September 20, 2013