A PC-based instrumentation board that overcomes many drawbacks of typical commercial data acquisition systems for electrophysiological recording applications

The accessibility of adequate instrumentation to conduct fundamental researches for the development of new diagnostic tools and methods in electrophysiology is essential. As such, many researchers develop proprietary instrumentation systems based on commercially available data acquisition boards. These boards are typically not designed for recording electrophysiological signals and as such, they may introduce significant error artifacts such as signal distortions, which in turn may lead to false interpretations. In this paper, we describe a data acquisition board that has the specifications required to adequately record many electrophysiological signals (e.g. cardiac mapping, body surface potential mapping) under difficult conditions, as it is often the case in a fundamental research environment. Furthermore, unlike other comparable in-house systems, it enables custom hardware functions to be implemented to support specific requirements encountered in a research environment. The card can also be installed directly in any modern personal computer offering an inexpensive, open, powerful, and very flexible system allowing researchers to easily take advantage of both commercial hardware and software to tailor the final system configuration for their particular needs.