A life-threatening arrhythmia detection method based on pulse rate variability analysis and decision tree

Extreme bradycardia (EB), extreme tachycardia (ET), ventricular tachycardia (VT), and ventricular flutter (VF) are the four types of life-threatening arrhythmias, which are symptoms of cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, in this study, a method of life-threatening arrhythmia recognition is proposed based on pulse rate variability (PRV). First, noise and interference are wiped out from the arterial blood pressure (ABP), and the PRV signal is extracted. Then, 19 features are extracted from the PRV signal, and 15 features with highly important and significant variation were selected by random forest (RF). Finally, the back-propagation neural network (BPNN), extreme learning machine (ELM), and decision tree (DT) are used to build, train, and test classifiers to detect life-threatening arrhythmias. The experimental data are obtained from the MIMIC/Fantasia and the 2015 Physiology Net/CinC Challenge databases. The experimental results show that the DT classifier has the best average performance with accuracy and kappa coefficient (kappa) of 98.76 ± 0.08% and 97.59 ± 0.15%, which are higher than those of the BPNN (accuracy = 94.85 ± 1.33% and kappa = 89.95 ± 2.62%) and ELM (accuracy = 95.05 ± 0.14% and kappa = 90.28 ± 0.28%) classifiers. The proposed method shows better performance in identifying four life-threatening arrhythmias compared to existing methods and has potential to be used for home monitoring of patients with life-threatening arrhythmias.