Architecture of the basic physiologic recorder

Signals are acquired from medical instrumentation of many different types. They can be as small as a digital thermometer or as big as a magnetic resonance scanner. In spite of the differences in size, cost, and the type of data these devices obtain, most biomedical devices that acquire physiologic data have the same basic structure. The structure of what we will call the basic digital physiologic recording system will be described in this section with the details of each of the processes in the following sections. A block diagram of the basic digital physiologic recording system is shown in Fig. 1.1.