BRAVEHEART: Open-source software for automated electrocardiographic and vectorcardiographic analysis

Area of Science:

• Cardiology
• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Informatics

Background:

• Electrocardiographic (ECG) and vectorcardiographic (VCG) analyses are crucial for diagnosing cardiovascular disease and assessing future event risk.
• The increasing adoption of digital ECGs has spurred research into new analytical parameters.
• Widespread automated computer-based ECG/VCG analysis is hindered by the lack of open-source, customizable software.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce BRAVEHEART, an open-source software package for automated and reproducible ECG/VCG analysis.
• To provide researchers with a customizable and user-friendly tool for scientific analysis of digital ECG data.
• To facilitate further research in ECG/VCG analysis by reducing development time and resource investment.

Main Methods:

• Development of BRAVEHEART, an open-source, modular, and customizable software package in MATLAB.
• Implementation of automatic ECG/VCG processing, including signal denoising and artifact removal.
• Inclusion of non-dominant beat identification/removal, fiducial point annotation, VCG construction, and median beat construction.

Main Results:

• BRAVEHEART processes standard 12-lead digital ECGs, accepting various formats.
• The software performs automatic signal denoising, beat identification, and fiducial point annotation.
• Customizable measurements on median beats are generated, with results available in numeric and graphical formats.

Conclusions:

• BRAVEHEART offers easily customizable scientific analysis for ECGs and VCGs.
• The availability of BRAVEHEART is expected to advance ECG/VCG analysis research and improve study reproducibility.
• The software, its source code, and documentation are publicly accessible under the GNU GPL v3 license.