Spatial Density Reduction in the Study of the ECG Signal using Independent Component Analysis

Conventional 12-lead ECG can only record limited aspects of the heart electrical signals. Previously, an approach for the analysis of the ECG signal using high spatial resolution over 101 or 75 channels on the chest and back of the subject for recording the heart signal has been proposed by Zhu et al. They decomposed the original signals into distinct temporal source components by applying independent component analysis. In the current work, we reduce the number of recording channels to 24 and 12 while still able to decompose the ECG signals into similar source components. In addition, we propose a method to estimate the source components dipoles based on the Nelder-Mead simplex method. This approach facilitates the feasibility of the ICA study on the patients with moderate spatial resolution, since it requires significantly fewer leads for recording and easier diagnosis setup.