Neurocardiology is a broad interdisciplinary specialty investigating how the cardiovascular and nervous systems interact. In this brief introductory review, we describe several key aspects of this interaction with specific attention to cardiovascular effects. The review introduces basic anatomy and discusses physiological mechanisms and effects that play crucial roles in the interaction of the cardiovascular and nervous systems, namely: the cardiac neuraxis, the taxonomy of the nervous system, integration of sensory input in the brainstem, influences of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) on heart and vasculature, the neural pathways and functioning of the arterial baroreflex, receptors and ANS effects in the walls of blood vessels, receptors and ANS effects in excitable cells in the heart, ANS effects on heart rate and sympathovagal balance, endo-epicardial inhomogeneity, ANS effects with a balanced vagal and sympathetic stimulation, sympathovagal interaction, arterial baroreflex, baroreflex sensitivity and heart rate variability, arrhythmias and the arterial baroreflex, the cardiopulmonary baroreflex, the exercise pressor reflex, exercise-recovery hysteresis, mental stress, cardiac-cardiac reflexes, the cardiac sympathetic afferent reflex (CSAR), and neuromodulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis non-technical review introduces key concepts in personalized ECG monitoring (pECG), which aims to optimize the detection of clinical events and their warning signs as well as the selection of alarm thresholds. We review several pECG methods, including anomaly detection and adaptive machine learning (ML), in which learning is performed sequentially as new data are collected. We describe a distributed-network multiscale pECG system to show how the computational load and time associated with adaptive ML could be optimized.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCirc Arrhythm Electrophysiol
January 2021
Background: Ventricular tachyarrhythmias and sudden cardiac death show a circadian pattern of occurrence in patients with heart failure. In the rodent ventricle, a significant portion of genes, including some ion channels, shows a circadian pattern of expression. However, genes that define electrophysiological properties in failing human heart ventricles have not been examined for a circadian expression pattern.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomed Phys Eng Express
July 2019
Objective: Integrating cardiac-tissue patches into the beating heart and evaluating the long-term effects of such integration on cardiac contractility are two challenges in an emerging field of regenerative medicine. This pilot study presents tools for the imaging of contracting multicellular cardiac tissue constructs (MTCs) and demonstrates the feasibility of tracking the early development of strand geometry and contractions in ultrathin strands and layers of cardiac tissue using CINE MRI.
Approach: Cultured, ultrathin (~50-100-micron) MTCs of rat neonatal cardiomyocytes were plated in rectangular cell chambers (4.