The inspiratory impedance threshold device (ITD) was put forward by Lurie in 1995, and was assigned as a class Ⅱa recommendation by the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) resuscitation guidelines in 2005. The ITD is used to augment negative intrathoracic pressure during recoil of the chest so as to enhance venous return and cardiac output, and to decrease intracranial pressure. In the recent years many researches on the ITD have been1 carried out, but all the researches can not take out a clear evidence to support or refute the use of the ITD. This paper introduces the structure and working principle of the ITD in detail, the research results and the debates about the use of the ITD for the past years.
Artifacts produced by chest compression during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) seriously affect the reliability of shockable rhythm detection algorithms. In this paper, we proposed an adaptive CPR artifacts elimination algorithm without needing any reference channels. The clean electrocardiogram (ECG) signals can be extracted from the corrupted ECG signals by incorporating empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and independent component analysis (ICA). For evaluating the performance of the proposed algorithm, a back propagation neural network was constructed to implement the shockable rhythm detection. A total of 1 484 corrupted ECG samples collected from pigs were included in the analysis. The results of the experiments indicated that this method would greatly reduce the effects of the CPR artifacts and thereby increase the accuracy of the shockable rhythm detection algorithm.