Does an automatic detection method based on RR intervals accurately detect atrial fibrillation?
An automatic detection algorithm using RR interval density histograms and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test achieves high sensitivity and specificity for detecting atrial fibrillation.
This work describes a method for automatic detection of atrial fibrillation (AF) based on RR intervals. We define /spl Delta/RR to be the difference between successive RR intervals. The standard density histograms of RR and /spl Delta/RR intervals are determined from data in the MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation/flutter database. The present method estimates the similarity between the standard density histograms and a best density histogram by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test. The algorithm returns significance (p) of difference between given histograms. If the p value is smaller than a value (P/sub c/), the test density histogram is significantly different from the standard density histogram. If the test density histogram is not significantly different from the standard density histogram, we say the data is AF: Using the standard density histogram of /spl Delta/RR with P/sub c/=0.01, the average sensitivity is 93.2% and the average specificity is 96.7%.
Tateno et al. (Mon,) studied this question.