Computerized ECG diagnosis on a reduced lead set (limb leads)

Increasing interest in home care brings up the question of easy to handle ECG lead sets. Application of electrodes must be simple and not critical regarding electrode placement. For reproducibility requirements limb lead recording is choosen. The objectives of this study were to test the performance of signal processing and to find out the diagnostic power of the reduced lead set ECG for diagnosis. Complex localisation, beat typing and wave recognition are possible within acceptable error tolerances. The standard deviations of QRS-duration and QT-Interval measurement errors obtained with our HES-LIMB algorithm are still smaller than the IEC requirements up to 60 /spl mu/V added HF noise. Atrial fibrillation or flutter was detected with a sensitivity of 92% and a specificity of 98%. Investigations on diagnostic performance indicate that using Linear Discriminant Analysis for the Normal/Abnormal classification 93% sensitivity and 95% specificity can be achieved. For acute versus non acute ECG's 70% sensitivity and 97% specificity have been obtained.