Organization deterioration assessment from the surface ECG in the onset and termination of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation

Recently, it has been suggested that many episodes of atrial fibrillation (AF) may be partially organized at the onset. Moreover, several clinical studies have demonstrated that an AF organization increase occurs prior to its spontaneous termination (paroxysmal AF), which could be used to predict the paroxysmal AF termination. However, although severals AF organization estimators based on invasive and non-invasive analysis have been proposed, the time course of organization in the first and last minutes of AF has not been quantified yet. Thereby, the aim of this work was to study the organization variations within the first and last minutes of paroxysmal AF episodes from surface ECG recordings making use of sample entropy. An organization decrease in the first minutes after AF onset and an increase within the last minute before spontaneous AF termination were obtained, these results were coincident with the conclusions presented in previous clinical works. Thus, it can be concluded that paroxysmal AF organization variations can be assessed from surface recordings without the need of invasive measurements.