Category Archives: Biomedical Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Mind-Mapping and Reference Digging – Time Frame

As I’ve noted in previous posts, as I read a paper, I underline relevant passages. I also circle references I’m interested in. The paper then goes into my “to-map” file.

I like to “map” papers when I’m feeling braindead — when I’m too tired or too mentally exhausted to do things requiring extensive thought. This consists of loading relevant details for a paper into a mind map and then looking up all of the references I found interesting and adding them to my Cite-U-Like library.

I am feeling a bit tired today, and I just finished mapping a paper. By my timer, it took about 55 minutes for an 8-page paper. This is a pretty substantial amount of time (about 6.875 min/page). However, it allows me to browse or search a complete list of the relevant facts from papers I’ve read. This is much, much faster than re-reading each paper, and much more powerful than trying to keep track of all of the salient details in my head. I haven’t timed how long it takes me to map a paper before, and I’m going to try to remember to do it more. I’d like to get an average pages/minute. Of course, the times will be longer for “interesting” papers and shorter for less-“interesting” papers.

What do you do to keep track of important information from papers you’ve read?

What is a Harvard Respirator?

I was reading a paper today about a study on dogs, and it mentioned that the dogs were ventilated with a “Harvard Respirator”. It was pretty easy to find a few pictures on Google Images, but I couldn’t find much other information. Apparently it’s just a veterinary ventilator made by Harvard Apparatus. In case you ever need to know. I thought perhaps it was a particular type of device, like a “Holter Monitor”.

You will find a lot of mentions of Harvard respirators on Google, and they are mostly quotes from scientific papers stating that they used a Harvard respirator. Go figure.

ADDENDUM: The very same paper also mentions the pacing rate they used to stimulate the dog’s heart. They don’t mention the normal heart rate for a (mongrel) dog. I looked it up and found it here. It’s between 60-160 beats/min for average-sized adult dogs. That’s a pretty wide range. I’d like to see a plot of heart rate compared to size in dogs.

Cardiac Electrophysiology Basics – Request for Comments

I’ve written up a basic introduction, with pictures, to my field of research. I would really appreciate it if any of you could read it over, tell me if you find it understandable, what’s unclear, etc. I need people who aren’t very familiar with this stuff.

It’s lacking some later stuff that’s more relevant to my research (at this point) but I want to get the foundations right before I move on.

Please please please help me with this.

The page is here. Also, sorry if you got this cross-posted on my LiveJournal.