On the Detection of Premature Ventricular Contractions

Authors

Abstract

Premature Ventricular Contractions (PVC) are a cardiac arrhythmia that can be associated with an increased risk of adverse cardiac events such as ventricular arrhythmias and sudden death, particularly in patients with underlying heart diseases conditions. Therefore, the characterization of this arrhythmia becomes crucial in the early diagnosis and prevention of possible life threatening cardiac diseases.
In this paper a new approach for the automatic detection of PVCs is presented, based on morphological derivatives and information theory techniques. Using these approaches some characteristics are extracted, such as QRS complex morphology, cardiac rate variability, as well as their correlation with the characteristic waves of the ECG signal. In a second phase these characteristics are used as an input to a neural network classifier.
Sensibility and specificity results (respectively ** and **) shows the potential of the algorithm when applied to the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database

Subject

Biosginal processing; PVC detection

Conference

EMBC -2008, 30th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, August 2008