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.

New Rules

Perhaps “guidelines” is a better word. I have two of them, to ensure my sanity:

  1. Taking a half day off on Thursdays shall commence in the afternoon rather than the morning (followed by work in the afternoon)
  2. No taking Saturday off until homework is done. Then, if it’s done, take Sunday off instead.

I should note that my current rules include swapping Thursday for Sunday, taking Thursday off entirely and working all day Sunday.

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.

Leading Causes of Death in the US

People talking about cardiovascular disease research often mention that it’s the leading cause of death in the states. I went to look it up today and found the Center for Disease Control’s Leading Causes of Death Reports. You can break things down a number of ways. Cardiovascular disease is number one across all age groups, but up to age 34, #1 is unintentional injury. 35-64 it’s “Malignant Neoplasms” which I assume means cancer.

I guess I’d better try not to injure myself.