[Evaluation of a registration card for logging electrocardiographic records into standard personal computers]

The MS200 Cardioscope, from MRT Micro as., Norway, is a 12 channel ECG card to be directly inserted into a standard personal computer (PC). The standard ISA Bus compatible half length card comes with a set of 10 cables with electrodes and the software for recording, displaying and saving ECG signals. The system is supplied with DOS or Windows software. The goal of the present work was to evaluate the affordability and usability of the MS200 in a clinical setting.

We tested the 1.5 DOS version of the software. In 30 patients with various cardiac diseases the ECG signal has been recorded with MS200 and with standard Hellige CardioSmart equipment. The saved ECGs were recalled and printed using an Epson Stylus 800 ink-jet printer. Two cardiologists reviewed the recordings for a looking at output quality, amplitude and speed precision, artifacts, etc.

1) Installation: the card has proven to be totally compatible with the hardware; no changes in default settings had to be made. 2) Usage: the screens are clear; the commands and menus are intuitive and easy to use. Due to the boot-strap and software loading procedures and, most important, off-line printing, the time needed to obtain a complete ECG printout has been longer than that of the reference machine. 3) Archiving and retrieval of ECG: the ECG curves can be saved in original or compressed form: selecting the latter, the noise and non-ECG information is filtered away and the space consumption on disk is reduced: on average, 20 Kb are needed for 10 seconds of signal. The MS200 can be run on a Local Area Network and is prepared for integrating with an existing informative system: we are currently testing the system in this scenery. 4) MS200 includes options for on-line diagnosis, a technology we have not tested in the present work. 5) The only setting allowed for printing full pages is letter size (A4): the quality of printouts is good, with a resolution of 180 DPI.

In conclusion, the MS200 system seems reliable and safe. In the configuration we tested, it cannot substitute a dedicated ECG equipment: from this point of view, a smaller PCMCIA-type card with a battery-operated notebook PC will be more suitable for clinical uses. Nevertheless, the possibility to log and track ECG records, integrated into the department informative system, may provide a valuable tool for improving access to medical information.