Classification of ECG Using Chaotic Models

Abstract

Chaotic analysis has been shown to be useful in a variety of medical applications, particularly in cardiology. Chaotic parameters have shown potential in the identification of diseases, especially in the analysis of biomedical signals like electrocardiogram (ECG). In this work, underlying chaos in ECG signals has been analyzed using various non-linear techniques. First, the ECG signal is processed through a series of steps to extract the QRS complex. From this extracted feature, bit-to-bit interval (BBI) and instantaneous heart rate (IHR) have been calculated. Then some nonlinear parameters like standard deviation, and coefficient of variation and nonlinear techniques like central tendency measure (CTM), and phase space portrait have been determined from both the BBI and IHR. Standard database of MIT-BIH is used as the reference data where each ECG record contains 650000 samples. CTM is calculated for both BBI and IHR for each ECG record of the database. A much higher value of CTM for IHR is observed for eleven patients with normal beats with a mean of 0.7737 and SD of 0.0946. On the contrary, the CTM for IHR of eleven patients with abnormal rhythm shows low value with a mean of 0.0833 and SD 0.0748. CTM for BBI of the same eleven normal rhythm records also shows high values with a mean of 0.6172 and SD 0.1472. CTM for BBI of eleven abnormal rhythm records show low values with a mean of 0.0478 and SD 0.0308. Phase space portrait also demonstrates visible attractor with little dispersion for a healthy person's ECG and a widely dispersed plot in 2-D plane for the ailing person's ECG. These results indicate that ECG can be classified based on this chaotic modeling which works on the nonlinear dynamics of the system.