Noninvasive Measurement and Analysis of Laboratory Rat's Cardiorespiratory Movement

Monitoring physiological signs in animal testing is crucial for the development of new therapeutic strategies and better understanding of diseases. This paper exploits Doppler radar and nonlinear phase demodulation effect to achieve noncontact measurement of both displacements and frequencies of a laboratory rat's cardiorespiratory activities. The implementation of displacement acquisition method relying on demodulation-generated harmonics is described, and this paper provides a guideline of implementing the acquisition method. Demodulation-generated harmonics are analyzed, and the effect of vibration-generated harmonics is studied. To demonstrate the effectiveness, a 60-GHz radar is used that shows good correlation with the instrument-recorded data. Average errors of respiration rate and heart rate (HR) are 0.057% and 0.33%, respectively, using three test subjects. In addition, two drug tests are performed to verify the monitoring function with controlled raised/dropped HR. By observing the time periods before, during, and after drug injection, results of rat's physiological response to drugs reveal the drug efficacy and body reaction over time. The measured cardiorespiratory variations can provide useful information without using implant devices, and the implementation could be an improvement over current invasive methods. The result presented in this paper is believed to be the first reported simultaneous measurements of both frequencies and displacements of both respiration and heartbeat movements of a laboratory animal using microwave radar.