Orthogonal basis expansion based atrial activity reconstruction for atrial fibrillation electrocardiogram analysis

We propose a novel algorithm for extracting atrial activity from single lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signal sustained with atrial fibrillation (AF), based on a short-time expansion of an orthogonal basis function set. The method preserves the time variation of spectral content of the underlying AF signal, thus time-frequency analysis of the AF signal can be successfully performed. The new method is compared to the standard average beat subtraction (ABS) method using synthetic AF sustained ECG data. The orthogonal basis expansion method has a higher correlation with the original AF signal compared to the ABS method for a range of signal to noise ratio (SNR) levels, and correlation is improved by 16% at an SNR of 0dB. Time-frequency analysis of the reconstructed AF signal based on Bessel distribution also shows the superiority of the orthogonal basis expansion method over ABS.