title: Life-threatening ventricular arrhythmia recognition by nonlinear descriptor.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF) are ventricular cardiac arrhythmia that could be catastrophic and life threatening. Correct and timely detection of VT or VF can save lives.
  
  
  METHODS
  In this paper, a multiscale-based non-linear descriptor, the Hurst index, is proposed to characterize the ECG episode, so that VT and VF can be recognized as different from normal sinus rhythm (NSR) in the descriptor domain.
  
  
  RESULTS
  This newly proposed technique was tested using MIT-BIH malignant ventricular arrhythmia database. The relationship between the ECG episode length and the corresponding recognition performance was studied. The experiments demonstrated good performance of the proposed descriptor. An accuracy rate as high as 100% was obtained for VT/VF to be recognized from NSR; for VT and VF to be recognized from each other, the recognition accuracy varies from 84.24% to 100%. In addition, the results were compared favorably against those obtained using Complexity measure.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  There is strong potential for using the Hurst index for malignant ventricular arrhythmia recognition in clinical applications.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics Institute, 138671 Singapore. sunyan@bii-sg.org
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Kap Luk
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Chan
authors.forename: Shankar Muthu
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Krishnan
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003422:Critical Care / Q000379:methods*; D016638:Critical Illness; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D004562:Electrocardiography / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008955:Models, Cardiovascular; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D017180:Tachycardia, Ventricular / Q000175:diagnosis*; D014693:Ventricular Fibrillation / Q000175:diagnosis*