A Novel Application of Higher Order Statistics of R-R Interval Signal in Emd Domain for Predicting Termination of Atrial Fibrillation

Predicting termination of atrial fibrillation (AF), based on noninvasive techniques, can be invaluable in order to avoid useless therapeutic interventions and to minimize the risks for the patients. Currently, no reliable method exists to predict the termination of AF. We propose an algorithm for predicting termination of AF using higher order statistical moments of R-R interval signal calculated in both time and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) domains. In the proposed method, R-R interval signal is decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMF) and higher order moments including skewness, and kurtosis, as well as mean and variance, are calculated from the first four IMFs. The appropriateness of these features in predicting the termination of AF is studied using atrial fibrillation termination database (AFTDB) which consists of three types of AF episodes: N-type (non-terminated AF episode), S-type (terminated 1'min after the end of the record), and T-type (terminated immediately after the end of the record). By using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier for classification of AF episodes, we obtained sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictivity 92.47%, 95.29%, and 92.80%, respectively. The important advantage of the proposed method compared to the other existing approaches is that our algorithm can simultaneously discriminate the three types of AF episodes with high accuracy. The results demonstrate that the EMD domain is a particularly well-suited domain for analyzing nonstationary and nonlinear R-R interval signal in AF termination prediction application.