Recognition of diagnostically useful ECG recordings: Alert for corrupted or interchanged leads

The upgrade of mobile phones with applications for acquisition, pre-processing and transmitting the patient´s ECG to a hospital unit would be of great benefit for prevention against the most frequent mortality caused by heart failure. This idea is promoted by the Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2011, which encourages the development of algorithms for analysis of the ECG quality within few seconds, aiming to warn about diagnostically unacceptable recordings. This paper presents an algorithm for scoring the noise corruption level by evaluation of ECG amplitude dynamics, baseline wander, powerline interference, EMG and peak artifacts. The score achieved for participation in Event 1 is 0.908. Additionally unacceptable ECGs with interchanged leads are detected with sensitivity of 96.8% (30/31 files) for peripheral leads and 87% (40/46 files) for chest leads.