Abstract

Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) is an unexpected sudden death due to a loss of heart function and represents more than 50% of the deaths from cardiovascular diseases. Since cardiovascular problems change the features in the electrical signal of the heart, if significant changes are found with respect to a reference signal (healthy), then it is possible to indicate in advance a possible SCD occurrence. This work proposes SCD identification using Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals and a sparse representation technique. Moreover, the use of fixed feature ranking is avoided by considering a dictionary as a flexible set of features where each sparse representation could be seen as a dynamic feature extraction process. In this way, the involved features may differ within the dictionary’s margin of similarity, which is better-suited to the large number of variations that an ECG signal contains. The experiments were carried out using the ECG signals from the MIT/BIH-SCDH and the MIT/BIH-NSR databases. The results show that it is possible to achieve a detection 30 min before the SCD event occurs, reaching an an accuracy of 95.3% under the common scheme, and 80.5% under the proposed multi-class scheme, thus being suitable for detecting a SCD episode in advance.

Highlights

  • Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is an unexpected death caused by cardiovascular problems [1] with or without a history of heart disease [2,3]

  • Numerous heart diseases lead to SCD, such as ventricular tachyarrhythmias (VTA), ventricular tachycardia (VT), ventricular fibrillation (VF), bradyarrhythmia (BA), coronary artery diseases (CAD), valvular diseases (RV), myocardial infarction (MI) and genetic factors [6]

  • Since the aim is the early detection of changes in an ECG signal, which could be associated with a possible SCD, two general steps were followed in this methodology: (i) dictionary learning, to identify the features of each signal class in C and (ii) signal classification, by measuring the similarity between the features of a new input signal and the learned features for each class

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Summary

Introduction

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is an unexpected death caused by cardiovascular problems [1] with or without a history of heart disease [2,3]. SCD occurs within an hour after the onset of symptoms, the person has no history of a fatal heart condition [4]. SCD accounts for more than 50% of all deaths from cardiovascular disease [1], ranking second as the leading cause of death, after cancer [5]. SCD is a vital challenge for clinicians, as it can be experienced in individuals with no history of heart diseases. An early prediction of SCD in a person suffering a VF is of great value for timely intervention, increasing the survival rate

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