Differentiation between ischemic and heart rate related events using the continuous wavelet transform

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the main causes of death in the world, as a result much efforts have been made to detect early ischemia. Traditionally changes produced in the ST or STT segments of the heartbeat were analyzed. The main difficulty relies on alterations produced in the ST or STT segment because of non ischemic events, such as changes in the heart rate, the ventricular conduction or the cardiac electrical axis. The aim of this work is to differentiate between ischemic and heart rate related events using the information provided by the continuous wavelet transform of the electrocardiogram. To evaluate the performance of the classifier, the Long Term ST Database was used, with ischemic and non ischemic differentiated events annotated by specialists. The analysis was performed over 77 events (52 ischemic and 25 heart rate related), obtaining a sensitivity and positive predictivity of 86.64% for both indicators.