Evaluation of a shock advisory system with non-shockable pediatric rhythms

This study aims at validation of the specificity (Sp) of a shock advisory system (SAS) in automatic external defibrillators (AED) with non-shockable pediatric ECGs. Own pediatric ECG database is collected including lead II holter recordings from 46 children healthy and cardiac patients. A number of 10301 ten-second samples of non-shockable (N) rhythms are analysed. Adult ECG database (MIT-vfdb) is used to show the reference SAS criteria values for N(>; 18) and shockable S(>;18) rhythms. Specific ECG criteria of an AED SAS are evaluated: heart rate, slope uniformity of positive vs. negative peaks, deflections from signal extrema and signal mean in a narrow frequency band for QRS complexes enhancement. Pediatric N rhythms, age: (1-4), (5-8), (9-12) vs. adult N(>;18) show significant differences in all criteria, shifting in beneficial direction further away from S(>;18) when combined criteria are used. The SAS validation for N(l-4), N(5-8), N(9-12) present respectively Sp=100%, 99.8%, 100%, higher than N(>;18) with 99.6%.