Slope Analysis Based Methods for Detection of Ventricular Fibrillation and Ventricular Tachycardia

Ventricular fibrillation (VF) and ventricular tachycardia (VT) are among the life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias and their in-time and accurate detection are very significant. In this paper, the capability of slope to detect cardiac shockable arrhythmias as a feasible time-domain feature of the electrocardiogram signal (ECG) is discussed. Several slope analysis methods were investigated and an innovative algorithm which works in real-time is introduced. Furthermore, slope analysis is employed in one of the genuine methods of VT and VF detection as a pre-processing step instead of the conventional amplitude thresholdinganditisshownthatitcanbetterreflecttheshockable cardiac arrhythmias irregularities. Finally, the validity of all the methods were assessed by 231 records collected from CCU of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, MIT-BIH arrhythmia database, CU ventricular tachy-arrhythmia database (including 91 normal rhythm, 82 VT and 58 VF), all annotated and verified by expert cardiologists. The classification accuracy results showed a reliable performance in discrimination between normal, VT and VF rhythms.