Performance evaluation in the reconstruction of body surface potentials from reduced lead systems a comparative study of lead selection algorithms

Several methods for optimal lead selection from multi-lead electrocardiographic recordings are analyzed. The non selected leads are reconstructed from the selected leads according to least squares optimization and the performance is evaluated in terms of mean square error of the derived potentials. The algorithms were tested on a database of 72 body surface potential recordings divided into four different patient groups. Each dataset was divided into a study and test subsets. Two experiments were carried out: (1) all steps are performed over the test dataset (ideal case) and (2) the lead selection and transformation matrix is carried out over the study dataset but the performance is evaluated over the test dataset (real case). Our results show important reconstruction errors with either lead selection method and only increasing the number of leads reduces the error in reconstruction. However, if a reduced number of leads is to be selected outside the standard 12-lead ECG, the method proposed by Lux has been shown to be the best option.