Abstract: A cardiovascular monitoring system for measuring at least cardiac output comprises an implantable unit (2) configured for placement in a section of artery of a patient and a portable external unit (1) configured for mounting against or close to a patient's skin for bidirectional communication with the implantable unit. A cross-sectional area measurement sensor (8) includes at least one elastic conductive loop (15, 15a, 15b) and an electronic circuit (16) connected to the conductive loop configured to measure an inductance value of the conductive loop. At least one ultrasound transducer (7,11) is further configured to measure a velocity of blood flow based on a Doppler effect.

Abstract: The circuit for motion estimation in digitised video sequence encoders comprises at least an integrated circuit component (IM, IM1 . . . IMn) which is arranged to perform either the function of determining motion vectors and associated costs for different prediction modes, or the function of vector refinement, possibly in addition to prediction mode selection. The circuit (IM) is based on the use of two operating units (M1, M2) which are arranged to concurrently process in different ways different pixel groups according to a MIMD technique. Preferably, when the circuit performs motion vector determination, the operating units (M1, M2) are programmed to execute a genetic algorithm exploiting an initial vector population taking into account the temporal and spatial correlations in the picture.