Matryx Group is a medical technology company, producing HeartGuard – a game-changing ECG solution.  Matryx is comprised of medical and technology professionals with passion and expertise in innovative design, medical software development and IT. Matryx is committed to providing continuous improvement in the area of cardiac disease detection and diagnosis with unique and superior data acquisition, meeting unmet clinical needs with support for both wired and wireless applications.

HeartGuard

HeartGuard represents two significant areas of improvement:  1) Near 100% MRI ECG Gating/Triggering & Acquisition and 2) comprehensive Ischemia detection, solving two major unmet clinical needs:

Problem #1 – MRI throughput and diagnostics

Testing Throughput:  The quality and accuracy of VCG gating/triggering is key to improving total testing throughput.  Current ECG filtering processes, attempting to “clean up” the contaminated ECG signal, actually “clip” or “round off” the desired peak signals required for accurate synchronization.

Diagnostic monitoring during MRI:  Although VCG provides the best available triggering source, it does not provide any diagnostic capability.  Echo and Pulse Oximetry (PO²) provide basic levels of patient monitoring, but cannot effectively detect, do nothing to improve gating/triggering and throughput.

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

Problem #2 – Ischemia detection

Background:  If a serious ischemic condition goes undetected for more than 10 minutes, it can lead to scarification resulting in myocardial infarction (MI or Heart Attack), causing unnecessary patient risk and cost.  

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 ECG 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 additional issues present hurdles to improving accuracy in this area of concern:

Heart Orientation:  No ECG considers, as part of its design, the relevance of heart size and axis (<120° 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.

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

The HeartGuard Solution

Background:  HeartGuard meets these challenges and is comprised of “easy-adoption” patient and clinical elements:

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

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

§  Proprietary software algorithms providing:

o    Calibration (heart orientation adjustment and lead selection)

o    Detection (total thoracic coverage for significantly improved ischemic detection)

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

§  In-hospital Server-based analysis and reporting system

§  mHealth and Remote patient monitoring:

o    Smartphone equipped with embedded, proprietary software

o    Software as a Service (SaaS) monitoring center

HeartGuard Patented Software Algorithms:

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.

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

Computer Aided Lead Placement:  HeartGuard’s on-body electronic device selects the appropriate leads for optimum ECG.

Correlative analysis: Our correlation analytics identify synchronicities between captured multi-variant disease indicators and symptoms, providing improved disease validation of positive indicator status.

Contiguous wear: