A new method without reference channels used for ventricular fibrillation detection during cardiopulmonary...

Ventricular fibrillation (VF) is observed as the initial rhythm in the majority of patients suffering from sudden cardiac arrest. It is vitally important to accurately recognize the initial VF rhythm and then implement electrical defibrillation. However, artifacts produced by chest compression during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) make the VF detection algorithms utilized by current automated external defibrillators (AEDs) unreliable. CPR must be traditionally interrupted for a reliable diagnosis. However, interruptions in chest compression have a deleterious effect on the success of defibrillation. The elimination of the CPR artifacts would enable compressions to continue during AED VF detection and thereby increase the likelihood of resuscitation success. We have estimated a model of this artifact by adaptively incorporating noise-assisted multivariate empirical mode decomposition (NA-MEMD) and least mean squares (LMS) and then removing the artifact from the corrupted ECGs. The simulation experiment indicated that the CPR artifact could be accurately modeled without any reference channels. We constructed a BP neural network to evaluate the results. A total of 372 VF and 645 normal sinus rhythm (SR) ECG samples were included in the analysis, and 24 CPR artifact signals were used to construct corrupted ECGs. The results indicated that at different SNR levels ranging from 0 to -12 dB, the sensitivity and specificity were always above 95 and 80 %, respectively.