CAVIAR, a serial ECG processing and management system for pharmacological drug trials

The authors present a specific implementation of the CAVIAR serial analysis program which is intended to support the processing and the management of serial electrocardiograms (ECGs) from pharmacological drug studies. This system includes bedside, PC-based ECG data acquisition units, computerized unitary and serial ECG analysis software, and a ECG database management system which partly implements the conceptual reference model for ECG data storage developed in the SCP-ECG European project. Several system architectures have been considered, from bedside integration of the complete data processing sequence up to networked distributed data processing, automatically performed either in real time or in batch mode. The serial ECGs are processed following the CAVIAR method, based on an optimal comparison of successive space-time ECG images. Emphasis is put on both ECG-related data-flow management and on the request functions which are supported