Predicting Ventricular Defibrillation Results Using Learning Models: A Design Practice and Performance Analysis

Abstract

This work proposes a learning model to predict the outcome of electrical defibrillation from ECG signals in ventricular fibrillation (VF) periods, which is a lethal situation happening when a patient is suffering cardiac arrest. An animal experiment of rats is conducted to obtain the ECG signals and necessary information for this study. This proposed model only extracts one feature from the ECG signals and enjoys low computational complexity at both training and testing stages. The statistics of this extracted single feature is further analyzed, and mathematical closed-form formulas for several interesting performance indices including the sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, precision and Area Under the Curve (AUC) are obtained to gain more insights of the proposed system. Moreover, the extracted feature can be treated as a linear combination of individual frequency components of the ECG signal, where the combining coefficients of the linear combination may show informative clinical inference. Frequencies corresponding to large trained combining coefficients imply that they contribute more in distinguishing the defibrillation outcome, and vice versa. As a result, important frequencies of the ECG signals can be identified and insignificant frequencies can also be filtered out by the proposed training. Simulation results corroborate the analytical results, and show that the proposed scheme greatly outperforms several competitive learning models and traditional methods in terms of testing accuracy and computational complexity.