Virtual Cardiology Lab, EKG, Etc

Cow Heart

Over the past few weeks we have been learning about the heart and our cardiovascular system. This post is going to be combining several labs and a dissection. To start with we did a dissection of a cow, sheep, and pig heart. We cut down the middle of the heart and made it to where the ventricles and atrium's were visible on both sides. Then we started to take measurements of pretty much all of the main parts of the heart and found most of them to be relatively the same. The cow heart was pretty huge and dwarfed the sheep heart, which was mainly covered by fat. The heart to the left is a cow heart and was a really good example of how they showed all of the ventricles, atrium's, and the arteries and veins. So that is a pretty basic overview of what our lab was, the most consistent thing in our lab was that the left ventricle walls were the thickest in the heart. Here is a graph to show all 10 of the measurements we took on the three hearts.

Click on the Graph to Enlarge

Andrew

Andrew Reversed

The next lab we did was on our heart beat, pulse, and blood pressure. We experimented with the older equipment first to try and get this data, but found that neither of us were really good enough to listen for a heart beat with a stethoscope. So then we used the newer blood pressure cuffs that pretty much did all of the hard stuff for us and gave us our information. The graphs are our heart beat over a time span of 5 seconds. We found most of them to be relatively similar with the dips and jumps, also called (p,q,r,s,t). The graphs to the left are our data that we collected on a different pulse experiment. We actually didn't record any of our data on cuffs. But they probably would have showed the same relative heart beat as this graph does. To do this lab we hooked up to a machine with 3 wires going to us, red, green, and a black one that acted as a ground wire. When it says our name and then reversed at the end it is just when we switched the green and red wires around and gave us our heart beat upside down. The EKG, also known as an Electrocardiography machine gathers its data by monitoring the electrical activity of the heart over time. This is usually gathered by probes placed on the skin that picks up electrodes on the skin and amplifies them to a certain extent and thus gives us the EKG readings on the machine.

Daniel Reversed

Daniel

Brian

Brian Reversed