An algorithm for continuous real-time QT interval monitoring

QT interval measurement in the patient monitoring environment is receiving much interest because of the potential for proarrhythmic effects from both cardiac and noncardiac drugs. The American Heart Association and American Association of Critical Care Nurses practice standards for ECG monitoring in hospital settings now recommend frequent monitoring of QT interval when patients are started on a potentially proarrhythmic drug. We developed an algorithm to continuously measure QT interval in real-time in the patient monitoring setting. This study reports our experience in developing and testing this automated QT algorithm. Compared with the environment of resting ECG analysis, real-time ECG monitoring has a number of challenges: significantly more amounts of muscle and motion artifact, increased baseline wander, a varied number and location of ECG leads, and the need for trending and for alarm generation when QT interval prolongation is detected. We have used several techniques to address these challenges. In contiguous 15-second time windows, we average the signal of tightly clustered normal beats detected by a real-time arrhythmia-monitoring algorithm to minimize the impact of artifact. Baseline wander is reduced by zero-phase high-pass filtering and subtraction of isoelectric points as determined by median signal values in a localized region. We compute a root-mean-squared ECG waveform from all available leads and use a novel technique to measure the QT interval. We have tested this algorithm against standard and proprietary ECG databases. Our real-time QT interval measurement algorithm proved to be stable, accurate, and able to track changing QT values.