In excess of 7 million people worldwide die of coronary heart disease each year. Only one-third of these heart attack victims recover completely. The remainder suffer the consequences of myocardial infarction and its ill fated remodeling process, resulting in chronic congestive heart failure. This malady alone is the leading cause of hospital admissions in the United States. New breakthroughs in stem cell therapy and tissue engineering have promised to reverse this dismal outcome by cardiovascular repair. World authorities, including scientists and regulatory authorities, have joined in a collaborative effort to present for the reader the first collective review of stem cell therapy for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. These contributions in basic science, pre-clinical and clinical experience guided by the regulatory pathways, assure a rapid course of translational research and clinical trials. The contents of this publication will become a prerequisite for those preparing to meet the challenges of this exciting and potentially rewarding field of stem cell research.

In excess of 7 million people worldwide die of coronary heart disease each year. Only one-third of these heart attack victims recover completely. The remainder suffer the consequences of myocardial infarction and its ill fated remodeling process, resulting in chronic congestive heart failure. This malady alone is the leading cause of hospital admissions in the United States.

New breakthroughs in stem cell therapy and tissue engineering have promised to reverse this dismal outcome by cardiovascular repair. World authorities, including scientists and regulatory authorities, have joined in a collaborative effort to present for the reader the first collective review of stem cell therapy for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. These contributions in basic science, pre-clinical and clinical experience guided by the regulatory pathways, assure a rapid course of translational research and clinical trials.

The contents of this publication will become a prerequisite for those preparing to meet the challenges of this exciting and potentially rewarding field of stem cell research.

Cardiovascular diseases represent the most frequent cause of death in Europe. Consequently, their diagnoses appear a vital task. In cardiology unit, ECG signal still remains the dominant used tools for arrhythmia and heart diseases analysis. In fact, the ECG is a non-invasive tool to explore the functional heart sate. It is an electrical signal varying according to the electrical heart state. From the ECG signal, some significant parameters can be extracted. Generally, the durations and the shapes of the different waves are taken as bio-indicators of certain cardiac anomalies. In fact, manual detection and classification of ECG waves is a difficult and annoying task especially for the analysis of the long recordings as in Holters and ambulatory cases. Besides, a detailed analysis of 12-leads ECG used to identify the presence or the absence of the cardiac malfunction is also irritating. However, and due to large number of patients in intensive care units, the need for continuous heart activity monitoring is necessary requiring therefore the automatic analysis of the ECG signal.