Removal of CPR artifacts in ventricular fibrillation ECG by local coherent line removal

We extend a method described by Sintes/Schultz (1998) for the removal of coherent signals in stationary broadband noise to the case of non-stationary broadband noise by applying time-frequency methods. The new method is applied to the removal of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) artifacts in the ECG of domestic pig suffering from ventricular fibrillation (VF). The excellent filtering properties and the possibility of real-time signal processing might have applications in emergency medical settings.

[1]  J.B. Allen,et al.  A unified approach to short-time Fourier analysis and synthesis , 1977, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[2]  S. O. Aase,et al.  Predicting Outcome of Defibrillation by Spectral Characterization and Nonparametric Classification of Ventricular Fibrillation in Patients With Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest , 2000, Circulation.

[3]  A. Amann,et al.  The Prediction of Defibrillation Outcome Using a New Combination of Mean Frequency and Amplitude in Porcine Models of Cardiac Arrest , 2002, Anesthesia and analgesia.

[4]  S. Qian,et al.  Joint time-frequency analysis , 1999, IEEE Signal Process. Mag..

[5]  J J Heger,et al.  Sudden cardiac death. , 1998, Circulation.

[6]  J Bisera,et al.  Electrocardiographic waveform analysis for predicting the success of defibrillation , 2000, Critical care medicine.

[7]  A. Amann,et al.  Algorithms to analyze ventricular fibrillation signals , 2001, Current opinion in critical care.

[8]  Karlheinz Gröchenig,et al.  Foundations of Time-Frequency Analysis , 2000, Applied and numerical harmonic analysis.

[9]  R. Virmani,et al.  Sudden cardiac death. , 1987, Human pathology.

[10]  George A. Mensah,et al.  Sudden Cardiac Death in the United States, 1989 to 1998 , 2001, Circulation.

[11]  Jens Timmer,et al.  Confidence Regions for Spectral Peak Frequencies , 1997 .

[12]  James McNames,et al.  Harmonic spectrogram for the analysis of semi-periodic physiologic signals , 2002, Proceedings of the Second Joint 24th Annual Conference and the Annual Fall Meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society] [Engineering in Medicine and Biology.

[13]  Coherent Line Removal: Filtering out harmonically related line interference from experimental data, with application to gravitational wave detectors , 1998, gr-qc/9810004.

[14]  M. Weil,et al.  Electrocardiographic prediction of the success of cardiac resuscitation. , 1999, Critical care medicine.

[15]  H U Strohmenger,et al.  Analysing ventricular fibrillation ECG-signals and predicting defibrillation success during cardiopulmonary resuscitation employing N(alpha)-histograms. , 2001, Resuscitation.

[16]  Bruno Torrésani,et al.  Practical Time-Frequency Analysis , 1998 .