A new wearable multichannel magnetocardiogram system with a SERF atomic magnetometer array.

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Cardiovascular Electrophysiology
• Biophysics

Background:

• Magnetocardiography (MCG) offers non-invasive assessment of cardiac electrical activity.
• Existing MCG systems often face limitations in portability and signal quality.
• Advancements in sensitive magnetic field sensors are crucial for practical MCG applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a wearable multichannel human magnetocardiogram (MCG) system.
• To demonstrate the capability of MCG imaging for visualizing cardiac electromagnetic fields.
• To assess the reliability and accuracy of the developed wearable MCG system.

Main Methods:

• Development of a wearable system integrating a spin exchange relaxation-free (SERF) magnetometer array.
• Simultaneous multichannel MCG signal acquisition from healthy subjects.
• Application of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) for signal denoising.
• MCG imaging to visualize magnetic and current distributions.
• Validation against simultaneously recorded electrocardiogram (ECG) signals.

Main Results:

• Successful simultaneous recording of multichannel MCG signals from a healthy human.
• Effective denoising of MCG data using ICA and EMD techniques.
• Generation of MCG images depicting cardiac electromagnetic activity.
• Demonstrated correlation between MCG and ECG waveforms, confirming signal validity.
• Confirmation of the system's reliability for MCG detection and cardiac imaging.

Conclusions:

• The developed wearable multichannel MCG system based on SERF magnetometers is reliable.
• The system enables effective visualization of cardiac electromagnetic activity through MCG imaging.
• This technology holds promise for advanced non-invasive cardiac diagnostics.