Spectrum-based dominant frequency estimation becomes unstable with cycle length variations greater than 20% and is not advisable for use as a clinical marker or study endpoint.
Precludes using spectrum-based dominant frequency as a reliable clinical marker in highly variable atrial.
Intracardiac electrogram recordings during atrial fibrillation (AFib) are characterized by irregular rhythms and complex morphologies. Hence, analysis in the time domain is a difficult task. The so called dominant frequency DF is a spectrum based approach that aims at finding the most relevant frequency in a signal providing information about the rate and dynamics of AFib. However, in recent years various studies reported controversial results regarding the clinical relevance of the DF . In this work, a definition of the DF at a fundamental scale is proposed as the rate at which action potentials are triggered in atrial cells. The most common method to estimate the DF in literature, labeled as DF Spec , is examined in comparison to the proposed definition. A signal processing study using synthetic signals verified that the DF Spec is stable for all changes in morphology of atrial activations. However, it is also demonstrated that the DF Spec becomes unstable for variations above 20% in the cycle length of a signal. Spectrum based DF estimation should be interpreted in a critical manner and is not advisable for study endpoints or clinical markers.
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Schwaderlapp et al. (2017) studied this question.
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