Spatiotemporal QRST cancellation method for 3-lead ECGs

Abstract

The analysis and characterization of atrial tachyarrhythmias like atrial fibrillation (AF) require an extraction of the atrial activity (AA) from present ECG recordings by eliminating all ventricular activity (VA). This contribution develops a new QRST cancellation approach with an independent component analysis (ICA) for 3-lead ECG recordings. The small set of leads leaves residual parts of the QRS complex in the extracted AA. Therefore a post-processing with a discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) is used to detect position and duration of all remaining QRS complexes for further elimination. The result is a VA-free signal sequence describing only the AA which offers the requirement for a safe AF frequency determination needed for further characterizations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.