QRS subtraction effect on frequency changes of persistent atrial fibrillation data due to isoprenaline and atropine infusion

Atrial fibrillation (AF) has been one of the frequent discussed cardiac arrhythmias topic nowadays. One of the previous researches by Ahmad, A. has overall proven the ability of isoprenaline drug to increase the heart rate, thus increasing the dominant frequency (DF) after infusion as well as the ability of the atropine drug to reduce the heart rate, thus decreasing the DF of AF patients after infusion. However, the effect of QRS subtraction on the persistent AF data was not analyzed. Hence, this paper is intended to investigate the effect of QRS subtraction on the DF changes of the persistent AF data due to isoprenaline and atropine infusion. The same patient data were used for the research, but with two labels chosen and an additional step of QRS subtraction performed before applying Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) method for DF analysis. The results show that the use of QRS subtraction step could help increase the percentage of positive respond of DF under isoprenaline and atropine drugs influence.