Detection of ventricular fibrillation and tachycardia from the surface ECG by a set of parameters acquired from four methods

The recent development and increased application of automatic external defibrillators have prescribed very strong requirements towards ventricular fibrillation (VF) and fast ventricular tachycardia (VT > 180 bpm) detection from the surface electrocardiogram (ECG). We attempted to use informative parameters from several existing analysis methods and from a method developed in-house. A set of nine parameters was derived initially, with four of them being selected after statistical assessment. Detection of VF against non-shockable rhythms was obtained using the K-nearest neighbours classification method, with 98.6% specificity and 96.7% sensitivity. The detection accuracy remained high after inclusion of VT episodes above and below 180 bpm to shockable and non-shockable rhythms respectively and after the addition of noise. Test signals were taken from the well-known ECG signal databases of the American Heart Association and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH-'cudb' and 'vfdb' files).