Shock Advisory System for Heart Rhythm Analysis During Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Using a Single ECG Input of Automated External Defibrillators

Minimum “hands-off” intervals during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) are required to improve the success rate of defibrillation. In support of such life-saving practice, a shock advisory system (SAS) for automatic analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG) contaminated by chest compression (CC) artefacts is presented. Ease of use for the automated external defibrillators (AEDs) is aimed and therefore only processing of ECG from usual defibrillation pads is required. The proposed SAS relies on assessment of outstanding components of ECG rhythms and CC artefacts in the time and frequency domain. For this purpose, three criteria are introduced to derive quantitative measures of band-pass filtered CC-contaminated ECGs, combined with three more criteria for frequency-band evaluation of reconstructed ECGs (rECG). The rECGs are derived by specific techniques for CC waves similarity assessment and are reproducing to some extent the underlying ECG rhythms. The rhythm classifier embedded in SAS takes a probabilistic decision designed by statistics on the training dataset. Both training and testing are fully performed on real CC-contaminated strips of 10 s extracted from human ECGs of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest interventions. The testing is done on 172 shockable strips (ventricular fibrillations VF), 371 non-shockable strips (NR) and 330 asystoles (ASYS). The achieved sensitivity of 90.1% meets the AHA performance goal for noise-free VF (>90%). The specificity of 88.5% for NR and 83.3% for ASYS are comparable or even better than accuracy reported in literature. It is important to note that, the aim of this SAS is not to recommend shock delivery but to advice the rescuers to “Continue CPR” or to “Stop CPR and Prepare for Shock” thus minimizing “hands-off” intervals.