Detection of P waves in resting ECG: a preliminary study

Detection of atrial activity (P, atrial flutter, and fibrillation waves) in resting electrocardiograms (ECGs) is an important step in rhythm analysis. The authors describe the results of preliminary work on P wave detection on a training set of 33 ECGs and a test set of 37 ECGs. Data of leads II and V1 were used. Median QRS-STT segments were subtracted from the rhythm data and the residual in the QRS regions was zeroed. Resulting signals were low pass filtered, first and second differenced, and combined into a detection function, which was used to detect and delineate P waves. For all the detected P waves, indexes were computed based on P duration, P-R interval and P-P interval. The initial results are very encouraging