Ventricular late potential analysis with musical and harmonic wavelets

Harmonic and musical wavelets were introduced by DE Newland in 1994, and have their spectrum tightly defined, therefore greatly reducing spectral leakage that may disturb signal frequency analysis. We have explored the ability of these wavelets to perform detection and quantification of ventricular late potentials (VLP) through our multiresolution time-scale method of energy comparison between the ST and TP segments of the ECG. Since reduction of spectral leakage improves the method's reliability, Newland wavelets provided better results than Daubechies wavelets in our study cases. The only drawback is the comparatively reduced time resolution of Newland wavelets. This required us to concatenate a number of ST segments to form a longer data set that is more representative of the high-resolution ECG (HR-ECG) of a patient than one individual beat. This approach may also be considered for other applications in the HR-ECG field. The spectral properties of the Newland wavelets play a major role in the improvement in our results.