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Chapter 22 Safety-Critical Systems And Engineering Design: Cardiac And Blood-Related Devices
Published in B H Brown, R H Smallwood, D C Barber, P V Lawford, D R Hose, Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, 2017
Our second detailed example of a safety-critical system is the defibrillator. Defibrillators are devices that are used to apply a large electric shock to the heart. They are used to restore a normal sinus rhythm to a heart which is still active but not contracting in a co-ordinated fashion. The cause of fibrillation is commonly ischaemia of heart tissue but less common causes are electric shock, drugs, electrolyte disorders, drowning and hypothermia. The use of a defibrillator on a patient following a heart attack is an emergency procedure, as the pumping action of the heart has to be restarted within a few minutes if the patient is to survive. The defibrillator is therefore a ‘safety-critical’ device; if it fails to work when required then the patient will die.
Treatment Devices
Published in Laurence J. Street, Introduction to Biomedical Engineering Technology, 2023
Defibrillators function by delivering a short pulse of electric current to the heart. This pulse of current polarizes all of the muscle and nerve cells in the heart simultaneously and (hopefully) allows them to resume normal operation—that is, to produce coordinated contractions in the heart so that blood is pumped through the body. A defibrillator consists of an energy source, circuitry to control the energy, and a means of delivering the energy to the heart.
Treatment Devices
Published in Laurence J. Street, Introduction to Biomedical Engineering Technology, 2016
Defibrillators function by delivering a short pulse of electric current to the heart. This pulse of current polarizes all of the muscle and nerve cells in the heart simultaneously and (hopefully) allows them to resume normal operation—that is, to produce coordinated contractions in the heart so that blood is pumped through the body. A defibrillator consists of an energy source, circuitry to control the energy, and a means of delivering the energy to the heart.
Simulating cardiac arrest events to evaluate novel emergency response systems
Published in IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering, 2020
Greg Lancaster, Jeffrey Herrmann
Sudden cardiac arrest is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, with over 350,000 out-of-hospital cases each year in the United States alone (Benjamin et al., 2018). Cardiac arrest survival requires a rapid intervention with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation. For each minute from the onset of cardiac arrest until treatment, the likelihood of survival decreases by 7 to 10% (Larsen et al., 1993)(About Cardiac Arrest, 2018). If not treated within the first 10 to 15 min, the outcome is nearly always fatal. The overall survival rate in the United States is about 10% (Abrams et al., 2013). Although a few communities have achieved significantly higher survival rates, many cities and rural areas are much lower.