A novel neural-network model for deriving standard 12-lead ECGs from serial three-lead ECGs: application to self-care

Synthesis of the 12-lead ECG has been investigated in the past decade as a method to improve patient monitoring in situations where the acquisition of the 12-lead ECG is cumbersome and time consuming. This paper presents and assesses a novel approach for deriving 12-lead ECGs from a pseudoorthogonal three-lead subset via generic and patient-specific nonlinear reconstruction methods based on the use of artificial neural-networks (ANNs) committees. We train and test the ANN on a set of serial ECGs from 120 cardiac inpatients from the intensive care unit of the Cardiology Hospital of Lyon. We then assess the similarity between the synthesized ECGs and the original ECGs at the quantitative level in comparison with generic and patient-specific multiple-regression-based methods. The ANN achieved accurate reconstruction of the 12-lead ECGs of the study population using both generic and patient-specific ANN transforms, showing significant improvements over generic (p -value < or = 0.05) and patient-specific ( p-value < or = 0.01) multiple-linear-regression-based models. Consequently, our neural-network-based approach has proven to be sufficiently accurate to be deployed in home care as well as in ambulatory situations to synthesize a standard 12-lead ECG from a reduced lead-set ECG recording.