The present invention provides a method of determining the overall oxidative status of a body fluid or a tissue of a patient by measuring the oxidation-reduction potential of the body fluid or tissue. Each multi-scale feature can be extracted using a separate two-dimensional spectro-temporal receptive filter. By using the Interrupt OUT pipe for this purpose, it is no longer necessary to store an entire rasterized page in the formatter memory of the printer before commencing printing of the page. The threshold estimator is used to determine the mean value of an input signal for each line, and this value is then taken as the optimum decision value for sampling the data bits for this line.