Classification of Ventricular Arrhythmias Based on a Data Driven Approach

Ventricular arrhythmias (VA) are dangerous pathophysiological conditions affecting the heart which evolve over time resulting in different manifestations such as ventricular tachycardia (VT), organized VF (OVF), and disorganized VF (DVF). Success of resuscitation for patients is greatly impacted by the type of VA and swift administration of appropriate therapy options. This thesis attempts to arrive at computationally efficient, data driven approaches for classifying and tracking VAs over time for two purposes: (1) ‘in-hospital’ scenarios for planning long-term therapy options, and (2) ‘out-of-hospital’ scenarios for tracking progression/segregation of VAs in near real-time. Using a database of 61 60-s ECG VA segments, maximum classification accuracies of 96.7% (AUC=0.993) and 87% (AUC=0.968) were achieved for VT vs. VF and OVF vs. DVF classification for ‘in-hospital’/offline analysis. Two near real-time approaches were also developed for ‘out-of-hospital’ VA incidents with results demonstrating the high potential to track VA progression and segregation over time.