Abstract(s)
Analysis of T waves in the electrocardiogram (ECG)
is an essential clinical tool for diagnosis, monitoring and followup of patients with heart dysfunction. During atrial flutter, this
analysis has been so far limited by the perturbation of flutter
waves superimposed over the T wave.
This paper presents a method based on missing data interpolation for eliminating flutter waves from the ECG during atrial
flutter. To cope with the correlation between atrial and ventricular electrical activations, the CLEAN deconvolution algorithm
was applied to reconstruct the spectrum of the atrial component
of the ECG from signal segments corresponding to TQ intervals.
The location of these TQ intervals, where the atrial contribution
is presumably dominant, were identified iteratively. The algorithm yields the extracted atrial and ventricular contributions
to the ECG. Standard T-wave morphology parameters (T-wave
amplitude, T peak – T end duration, QT interval) were measured.
This technique was validated using synthetic signals, compared
to average beat subtraction in a patient with a pacemaker and
tested on pseudo-orthogonal ECGs from patients in atrial flutter.
Results demonstrated improvements in accuracy and robustness
of T-wave analysis as compared to current clinical practice.