Without the heart it is impossible for a person to stay alive. Although it is also necessary that a heartbeat between 60 and 100 times per minute prevail or else the problems begin. With this in mind, the cardiac arrhythmias They are usually caused by deficiencies with the electrical conduction system of this vital organ and must be attended to immediately.
Based on the Medline portal, the most common causes of abnormal heartbeat are the following:
- Abnormal levels of potassium or other substances in the body.
- Heart attack or damage to the heart muscle from a past heart attack.
- Heart disease that is present at birth (congenital).
- Heart failure or an enlarged heart.
- hyperthyroidism
Mexican innovation is recognized worldwide
Because it is a problem that can have fatal consequences, technology has focused on offering solutions. A clear example is the project “A medical decision support system for the diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias”, by the postgraduate doctoral student in Electrical Engineering, Jonathan Roberto Torres Castillo, and his tutor, Miguel Ángel Padilla Castañeda, a researcher at the Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology (ICAT) of the UNAM. But that’s not all, but they both got the LARA award (Latin America Research Awards) 2021 awarded by the Google company.
The university students, members of the ICAT Bioinstrumentation group and the Technological Research and Development Unit of the Institute at the General Hospital of Mexico “Dr. Eduardo Liceaga”, propose to design a low-cost portable electrocardiography system. In conjunction with artificial intelligence algorithms, it would be able to detect irregular heartbeat, such as bradycardia and tachycardia, with high sensitivity and specificity. The project would be useful in remote communities that do not have access to specialists or expensive medical diagnostic equipment.
In addition, it will offer the possibility for all people to receive an adequate and timely diagnosis, regardless of their socioeconomic situation and their place of residence. This will make it easier for them to start early treatment, in order to improve their quality of life.
This year, the company reported, from a base that exceeded 700 applications, 24 projects were selected as winners. Of which 14 are from Brazil, three from Argentina, three from Chile, two from Mexico, one from Peru and one from Uruguay.
Together they will receive half a million dollars to continue or start research in fields of knowledge ranging from COVID, diversity, equity and inclusion and machine learning applied to health, to language processing, privacy and climate change, among others.
In this regard, Torres Castillo said that “the recognition is not only for us, but for UNAM and for Mexico, and allows us to show the world that we do cutting-edge research, that it is worth continuing to invest in education and support young people so that apply your intellect and knowledge in solving important problems for the world”.
What is the project about?
One of the research lines of the ICAT Bioinstrumentation group is the analysis of biosignals, focused on improving the understanding of different diseases so that doctors can have greater specificity when treating them. In our case, Torres Castillo said, “we focused on heart disease, which is among the leading causes of death in the world.”
In 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), Ischemic heart disease is at the top of the list of diseases that cause death. It is responsible for 16 percent of all deaths. As of the year 2000, the greatest increase in deaths corresponds to this disease, which went from more than two million in that year, to 8.9 million in 2019.
Furthermore, the number of people with heart problems is increasing worldwide, due to lifestyles (sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy diet) and the increase in life expectancy (ageing) in the population. Hence the importance of proposing ideas that allow us to be more efficient, reduce costs and risks, and improve the quality of patient care.
Sometimes patients also require specialized tests (blood, biopsies, imaging) to confirm the diagnosis; but not everyone has access to them or it can take months.
“To do this, from the signals of the heart, which are the sum of small electrical potentials, we process, filter, average and robust statistical mathematical analysis to find where the fault (arrhythmia) is.”
For the development of the algorithm that identifies inherent patterns in cardiac signals and can automatically detect arrhythmias. They detailed that hundreds of thousands of data captured around the world, clinically validated by experts, were used to indicate “stretches” of signals where the presence of heart disease is.
Once the algorithm is coupled to an electronic device, in a matter of seconds the main cardiac “faults” could be tracked, 90 percent of which correspond to the most common group, including fibrillations, lateral blocks, bradycardia and tachycardia
The next phase of the project is its clinical validation in inter-institutional collaboration with the Hospital General de México “Dr. Eduardo Liceaga” and the National Institute of Cardiology “Dr. Ignatius Chavez.