A brief history of seismocardiography

"Seismocardiography is a noninvasive technique developed for recording and analyzing cardiac vibratory activity as a measure of cardiac contractile performace. " [1]

--Early Age--

As far as in 1961, Russian scientist BOZHENKO BS published a paper Seismocardiography--a new method in the study of functional conditions of the heart. It can be trust that the term seismocardiography (SCG) is first proposed in this paper. Later in 1964, Russian scientist BAEVSKII RM, et, al published another paper SEISMOCARDIOGRAPHY.

In 1976, the first application of this technique seems also come from Russian scientists. Bal'maqiia TA and his colleagues used SCG to examine healthy infants and young children .

Regretfully, so far, none of these original papers has been found through Internet, not even the English translation.

--Morden Age--

In 1988, American scientist Salerno DM & Zanetti JM patented Cardiac compression wave measuring system and method, where the term seismocardiography is first proposed in western and registered. It use seismic techniques and principle to measure cardiac performance by detecting compression waves generated by heart muscle function [2].

In this patent, an seismic accelerometer (usually piezoelectric accelerometer) high sensitivity at ultra-low frequency (0-800Hz) is placed on the chest region of a horizontally disposed patient. Tha analog signals is read and passed through a low-pass fileter (0-50Hz).

In 1991, Salerno DM & Zanetti JM's published a paper Seismocardiography: a technique for recording precordical acceleration, which marked the academic study of SCG. Later in the same year, Salerno and Zanetti, with other colleagues published several papers concerning the potential applications of this technique. These research studied the effect of some abnormal cardiac activities to the signal of SCG, those activities include obstruction of coronary blood flow during balloon angioplasty [3], left ventricular function change during ischemia [4]. Piezoelectric accelerometer was chosen as transducer during their experiments. Signal pattern identification and noise analysis is another important work carried out during their initial researches [5].

In 1994, relationship between seismocardiogram and echocardiogram for events in the cardiac cycle is studied by ganroth, Hannan P, Salerno DM.

In 1999, the SCG grabbed attention of Zanetti JM for its magnetic-field-compatible, which is extremelly useful during MRI process [6]. It provide a alternative method for ECG, which has restriction application in MRI by its very nature.

In 2002 and 2005, polish Piotrowicz R. carried out the experiment of using SCG to estimate left ventricular function and coronary artery disease [7][8]. No full text papers has been found yet. It is interesting that these expierments have the same focus in the research carried out by Salerno DM and Zanetti JM, et, al in 1991.

In 2003 and 2004, vibration isolation of SCG during MRI is studied by K. Naemura, et, al in [12][13].

In 2006, Pavel Smrcka (Czech) proposed a method for pseudo-period detection in seismocardiographic signal[9].

In 2007, Jared B Shell (US) used low-cost geophone aceelerometer carried out three-axis seismocardiography [10].