ETD: An extended time delay algorithm for ventricular fibrillation detection

Ventricular fibrillation (VF) is the most serious type of heart attack which requires quick detection and first aid to improve patients´ survival rates. To be most effective in using wearable devices for VF detection, it is vital that the detection algorithms be accurate, robust, reliable and computationally efficient. Previous studies and our experiments both indicate that the time-delay (TD) algorithm has a high reliability for separating sinus rhythm (SR) from VF and is resistant to variable factors, such as window size and filtering method. However, it fails to detect some VF cases. In this paper, we propose an extended time-delay (ETD) algorithm for VF detection and conduct experiments comparing the performance of ETD against five good VF detection algorithms, including TD, using the popular Creighton University (CU) database. Our study shows that (1) TD and ETD outperform the other four algorithms considered and (2) with the same sensitivity setting, ETD improves upon TD in three other quality measures for up to 7.64% and in terms of aggregate accuracy, the ETD algorithm shows an improvement of 2.6% of the area under curve (AUC) compared to TD.