Modeling and synthesis of the wistar rat electrocardiogram

Abstract

In this work, we present a synthesizer of electrocardiographic signals of the experimental model of the Wistar rat. Firstly, we modeled the P, R, and S waves using Gaussian functions, while for the T-wave, we used a Gumbel function. We validated the proposed model using a Wistar rat electrocardiogram database, which contains 41 animals with 62,907 beats. Model global performance was CC (correlation coefficient) = 0.980 ± 0.009, and RE (relative error) = 0.194 ± 0.049. We also propose a transformation that allows the aforementioned model to be built from the standard ECG parameters, such as RR interval, P wave duration, PR interval, RS interval, QT interval, and P, R, S, and T wave amplitudes. In all cases, the correlation coefficients obtained were greater than 0.966, while the mean of the absolute errors of the parameters did not exceed 6 ms and 30 μV. Also, we have developed software that integrates the proposed model and the transformation. We used a system of coupled differential equations to synthesize several beats based on one cardiac beat pattern with the possibility of entering variability in the ECG parameters and adding noise to give realism to the electrocardiographic signals. In conclusion, we developed a synthesizer of Wistar rats ECG useful for several applications, such as delineation and segmentation, training and testing of automatic algorithms to detect and monitor, as well as novel filtering methods of these types of ECG signals.