Ventricular fibrillation detection using a leakage/complexity measure method

This paper presents a new method for detecting Ventricular Fibrillation (VF) based on a two step processing. The first one, based on the published VF Filter Leakage Method, consists in sampling data from the ECG and filtering it so that the more the signal resembles a sinusoidal wave, the lower the filter´s output value will be. This idea comes from the VF wave inspection which shows that it has some sinusoidal characteristics. In order to avoid false positive occurrences due to Ventricular Tachycardia (VT) episodes (which are sinusoidal as well), a second step, based on the Complexity Measure algorithm, was used consisting in generating a binary sequence by comparison between the sampled data and an adjustable threshold, and then, using this sequence to calculate the signal´s disorder level. The achieved sensitivity for the VF algorithm was 70.32% and its predictivity was 94.66%.