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Abstract

A medical monitor determines the period of a physiological function, such as blood circulation pulses, by operating a probe that produces an electrical signal which corresponds to the physiological function. The electrical signal is digitized at a given sampling rate to acquire a plurality of signal samples which are stored in a memory. A time scaling factor is adjusted dynamically so that the amount of signal samples being processed does not exceed a maximum limit. The magnitude of the signal samples also may be scaled dynamically. Serial autocorrelation is applied to the signal samples to produce a sequence of summation values. The quantity of summation values from the initial one in the sequence to a peak summation value is determined. The physiological function period is derived from the quantity of summation values, the given sampling rate, and any time scaling factor that was used.

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