Application of the Wigner distribution to the detection of late potentials in ECG

The problem of detecting micropotentials in high resolution ECGs is of great importance to predict ventricular tachycardia. Since both conventional time domain and frequential domain methods present serious limitations, we address this problem using a high resolution time frequency method. The possibilities of the spectrogram and Wigner distribution (WD) are evaluated in order to analyze ECGs acquired both on patients with and without ventricular tachycardia. Furthermore, quantitative features are extracted from those representations in order to discriminate the two classes.