Medical Engineering & Physics
Volume 28, Issue 8 , Pages 802-808, October 2006

Predicting spontaneous termination of atrial fibrillation using the surface ECG

  • Frida Nilsson

      Affiliations

    • Signal Processing Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Lund University, Box 118, S-221 00 Lund, Sweden
    • Corresponding Author InformationCorresponding author. Tel.: +46 46 2229775; fax: +46 46 2224718.
    • ,
  • Martin Stridh

      Affiliations

    • Signal Processing Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Lund University, Box 118, S-221 00 Lund, Sweden
    • ,
  • Andreas Bollmann

      Affiliations

    • Department of Cardiology, Good Samaritan Hospital and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles, USA
    • ,
  • Leif Sörnmo

      Affiliations

    • Signal Processing Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Lund University, Box 118, S-221 00 Lund, Sweden

Received 21 February 2005; received in revised form 20 November 2005; accepted 25 November 2005. published online 30 January 2006.

Abstract 

By recognizing and characterizing conditions under which atrial fibrillation (AF) is likely to terminate spontaneously or be sustained, improved treatment of sustained AF may result and unnecessary treatment of self-terminating AF avoided. Time–frequency measures that characterize AF, such as fibrillatory frequency, amplitude, and waveform shape (exponential decay), are extracted from the residual ECG following QRST cancellation. Three complexity measures are also studied, characterizing the degree of organization of atrial activity. All measures are analysed using a training set, consisting of 20 recordings of AF with known termination properties, and a test set of 30 recordings.

Spontaneous termination was best predicted by a low and stable fibrillatory frequency and a low exponential decay. Using these predictors, 90% of the test set was correctly classified into terminating and sustained AF. Neither fibrillation amplitude nor the complexity measures differed significantly between the two sets.

Keywords: Atrial fibrillation, Time–frequency analysis, Termination, Prediction, Surface ECG

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PII: S1350-4533(05)00252-3

doi:10.1016/j.medengphy.2005.11.010

Medical Engineering & Physics
Volume 28, Issue 8 , Pages 802-808, October 2006

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