Analysis of QRS loop in the Vectorcardiogram of patients with Chagas' disease

In the present work, we have studied the QRS loop in the Vectorcardiogram (VCG) of 95 chronic chagasic patients classified in different groups (I, II and III) according to their degree of myocardial damage. For comparison, the VCGs of 11 healthy subjects used as control group (Group O) were also examined. The QRS loop was obtained for each patient from the XYZ orthogonal leads of their High-Resolution Electrocardiogram (HRECG) records. In order to analyze the variations of QRS loop in each detected beat, it has been proposed in this study the following vectorcardiographic parameters a) Maximum magnitude of the cardiac depolarization vector, b) Volume, c) Area of QRS loop, d) Ratio between the Area and Perimeter, e) Ratio between the major and minor axes of the QRS loop and f) QRS loop Energy. It has been found that one or more indexes exhibited statistical differences (p < 0.05) between groups 0-II, O-III, I-II, I-III and II-III. We concluded that the proposed method could be use as complementary diagnosis technique to evaluate the degree of myocardial damage in chronic chagasic patients.