A Real-Time Data Acquisition and Digital Signal Processing System for Neuromonitoring

This work reports a versatile real-time data acquisition, signal processing and sensor calibration system using NI (National Instruments) LabVIEW. The goal of the developed system is to simultaneously monitor different physiological parameters in an animals brain during traumatic brain injury (TBI). The system is developed in conjunction with the smart catheter sensor array which is an integrated platform of multiple microsensors in a single microcatheter device. The sensors simultaneously records key physiological parameters from an animal brain which includes temperature, partial pressure of Oxygen, Glucose, Lactate, Cerebral Blood Flow (CBF) and neural activity. The system after data acquisition and processing displays the real-time data in a user interface in a clear and concise way. A sensor calibration software is also developed using LabVIEW which provides calibration solution for the Smart Catheter sensors.;The developed system consists of a front end motherboard circuit interface which encodes the real-time analog signal to serial bits and transmits it to a backend system for data-logging and signal processing. The back-end system consists of a NI cRIO (Compact RIO) hardware with serial I/O ports. The cRIO system consists of an inbuilt FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chip and a Real-Time (RT) controller which are used for data processing and transmission to a Laptop computer with user interface. The program development was done using LabVIEW to create a high fidelity and fast response system. The developed system was tested with simulated signals to validate the system for long term monitoring application. Finally the Smart Catheter sensors were calibrated with the calibration function and in-vivo recording was done from a rats brain. The results of the experiments have been reported in this thesis.