HeartGuard – A breakthrough in ECG technology, providing:

TIQ² – Total Ischemia Quantification and Qualification
Clear ECG extraction during MRI
Improved ECG/Imaging synchronization
Heart-Orientation adjustment

Computerized lead placement

Easy-to-apply and wear patient system

The Company

Matryx Group is a medical technology company, producing HeartGuard.  Matryx is comprised of medical and technology professionals with a passion for innovative design and software development identifying unmet clinical needs and supporting continuous improvement in the area of cardiac disease detection and diagnosis.

 

Problem #1 – Ischemia detection

 

Background:  If a serious ischemia is undetected for more than 10 minutes, it can lead to scarification resulting in myocardial infarction (MI), causing unnecessary patient risk and potential hospital liability.  

 

Time-to-Treatment:  One hour after an occurrence the heart muscle (myocardial) degrades exponentially, quickly increasing patient risk and cost of treatment while decreasing the chances of survival.  Yet, the current average delay to treatment is well over 2 hours. - CDC, AHA, AEP, ACEP

Current state ECG technology:  Although most ECG systems are adequate for arrhythmia (irregular heart beat) detection, only the standard 12-lead (current gold standard) is used as the primary diagnostic tool for detecting ischemia.  Yet, the 12-lead is clinical known to spatially miss from 25-62% of all ischemia (Fesmire & Percy, Karlson, Foote, et al) and, temporally, can miss up to 30% of all transient ischemia.

 

ECG Data Acquisition:  Several issues present hurdles to improve accuracy in this area of concern:

 

Heart Orientation:  No ECG considers, as part of its design, the relevance of heart size and axis (<90° variance) to its chest-oriented lead placement.  As a result, ECG readouts provide the potential for misrepresentation of leads to assumed ECG waveform indicators. .

Lead Selection:  The national average rate of accuracy associated with trained clinician lead placement is 70%

 

Thoracic Coverage:  Cardiac ischemia, unlike arrhythmia, can occur anywhere within the thorax.  Spatial coverage of ECGs, including 12-lead, is not comprehensive, leaving ischemia occurring outside their realm of thoracic coverage, undetectable.

 

Continuous monitoring:  30% of transient cardiac ischemia escapes detection by 12-lead primarily due to the design of 12-lead ECG systems for snapshot (10-60 second) testing.  To capture transient cardiac disease indicators, particularly ischemia, a total thoracic, mobile and continuous ECG is necessary.

 

Challenge:  Provide an ECG solution that is capable of more accurate, comprehensive and early ischemia detection.

Problem #2 – No ECG during cardiac MRI testing

 

Background:  Magnetic Radio emanations contaminate the ECG waveform, rendering the ECG useless for diagnostics during cardiac MRI testing and greatly impairs its ability to provide an accurate synchronization source for MRI imaging.  In addition, MR incapacitation of ECG disallows any form of ECG diagnostic monitoring while the patient is undergoing chemically-induced stress attempting to reveal ischemia.

 

Testing Throughput:  Because of the high cost of sophisticated imaging systems (MRI, CT, PET, Nuclear), total workflow throughput is key to both system utilization and hospital profit margins.  Key to improving throughput is the quality and accuracy of ECG/Imaging timing synchronization.  Current ECG filtering processes, in attempt to clean up the contaminated ECG signal, actually negatively effect the desired peak signals required for accurate synchronization.

 

Current state ECG technology:  Although vector ECG provides to a near 80% triggering accuracy level, it still requires radiologists to capture additional images, during, and resetting measurements for poor resolution images, after testing is complete.  This incurs unnecessary time and resources, and increasing MRI workflow duration. 

 

Challenge:  Provide ability to decontaminate ECG waveforms from within the MR

 

The HeartGuard Solution

 

Background:  HeartGuard is comprised of:

§  Easy-to-apply and wear disposable -vest embedded with multiple electrodes and leadwires

§  On-body computation and communications device (wired and wireless)

§  Proprietary software algorithms providing:

o    Calibration (heart orientation adjustment and computerized lead selection)

o    Detection (total thoracic coverage)

o    Reporting (12-lead and proprietary 3D, disease-coded rendition of the heart)

§  In-hospital Server-based analysis and reporting system

§  Remote monitoring:

o    Smartphone equipped with embedded, proprietary software

o    Software as a Service (SaaS) monitoring center

 

HeartGuard Patented Software Algorithms:

 

TIQ2 – Provides both comprehensive detection of ischemia across the thorax (anterior and posterior).  It also represents a breakthrough in functionality critical to improved accuracy in the realm of cardiac disease detection.

Heart-Orientation Adjustment:  Initial application of HeartGuard, assesses heart size and axis and adjusts its selection of appropriate measured leads

Computerized Lead Selection:  HeartGuard’s on-body electronic device selects the

 

Clear ECG extraction – Ability to derive a clear ECG waveform from within the MR environment, with improved signal-to-noise ratio providing for improved ECG signal integrity for use during other imaging system testing where improved synchronization is required.

 

Correlative analysis = Our -correlation analytics identify synchronicities between captured multi variant disease indicators and symptoms, providing improved disease validation of false-positive and false-negative indications.

 

Contiguous wear

Whether the patient moves from the ER to OR, ICU to Telemetry or hospital to home, they can wear the same HeartGuard package, enjoy continuous cardiac monitoring while avoiding diagnostic system to provide  seamless, contiguous use across the ER, ICU/CCU, Telemetry, OR, Treadmill Stress and Remote Monitoring -all in an Easy-to-Wear package.