Detection of ectopic beats in single channel electrocardiograms

Autor: N. Kikillus, A. Bolz, Achim Hekler
Rok vydání: 2009
Předmět:
Zdroj: IFMBE Proceedings ISBN: 9783540892076
Popis: Automatic detection of ectopic beats is an important procedure for electrocardiogram (ECG) processing and analysis. This paper presents a new method for detection of ventricular (VEB) and supraventricular (SVEB) ectopic beats in single channel electrocardiograms. To extract morphological and rhythmical features we approximated the signal of each heartbeat using a sum of three Gaussians and rotated the Poincare plot by −45 degrees. The nine parameters of the Gaussians and the new coordinates of the rotated Poincare plot formed together the feature vector. At the beginning of the classification a test was carried out, whether the ECG signal included cardiac arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation. If this was the case, agglomerative hierarchical clustering would be applied on the approximated signals of heartbeats. Then the clusters were classified according to different aspects. If the result of the test was negative, a threshold algorithm exclusively based on rhythmical information would be performed. In contrast to other studies the proposed approach weights rhythmical and morphological parameters depending on the existence of arrhythmia. We tested our approach on 44 files of the MIT/BIH arrhythmia database providing an annotated collection of normal and ectopic beats. The sensitivity of our method is 96.9% for VEB and 90.9% for SVEB, the specificity 97.6%.
Databáze: OpenAIRE