A robust sequential detection algorithm for cardiac arrhythmia classification

In ibid., vol. 37, no. 9, p. 837-43 (1990) and Proc. IEEE 9th Annu. Conf. Eng. Med. Biol. Soc., p. 918-19 (1988) N.V. Thakor et al. describe a sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) based on threshold crossing intervals (TCI) for the discrimination of ventricular fibrillation (VF) from ventricular tachycardia (VT). However, in applying their algorithm to data from the MIT-BIH malignant arrhythmia database, the authors observed some overlap in the distributions of TCI for VF and VT resulting in 16% overall error rate for the discrimination. In this communication, the authors describe a modified SPRT algorithm, using a new feature dubbed blanking variability (BV) as the basis for discrimination. Using the MIT-BIH database, the preliminary results showed that the proposed method decreases the overall error rate to 5%.