Packet wavelet decomposition: An approach for atrial activity extraction

Detection of atrial activity (AA) is quite important in the study and monitoring of atrial rhythms, in particular atrial flutter and atrial fibrillation (FA). An efficient noninvasive study of the AA needs the ventricular activity cancellation. The Discrete Packet Wavelet Transform (DPWT) allows the decomposition of the original ECG in a set of coefficients with different temporal and spectral features, showing that it is possible to obtain the AA with a finite set of this blocks and the inverse transform. The principal advantage of the DPWT analysis is that it does not require several leads of the same ECG register so it should be applicable to the detection of different arrhythmias in Holter registers, where the number of leads is reduced.