Combined hardware/software techniques to record camera video of patient's behavior with contemporaneous physiological signals (EEG, ECG, PSG, etc.) onto digital media (optical disk, magnetic disk, D.A.T., etc.) in a PC environment will be developed and tested. The most current techniques for video data compression will be necessary and include two-dimensional intra-frame image compression as well as inter-frame redundancy reduction. A successful result will have many biomedical applications, both research related and clinical. This project will focus on its application to clinical video/EEG monitoring for epilepsy. Direct video/EEG recording to computer disk could replace video tape recording presently used clinically in hundreds of epilepsy centers. Significant time saving to find, analyze, and annotate seizures on video tape would result. Increased precision in correlating behavioral and physiologic data as well as a vast improvement in convenient archiving and networking video/EEG data files would also result.
A successful result would find immediate clinical application in epilepsy centers where video/EEG monitoring using VCRs takes place. Over 1000 such Centers exist now. Other biomedical applications including video microscopy, fluoroscopy, sleep monitoring, gait analysis, behavioral studies, and the like would find this technique valuable as well.
