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. 2014 Feb 4;9(2):e81896.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081896. eCollection 2014.

A novel approach to predict sudden cardiac death (SCD) using nonlinear and time-frequency analyses from HRV signals

Elias Ebrahimzadeh  1 , Mohammad Pooyan  1 , Ahmad Bijar  1
Affiliations

A novel approach to predict sudden cardiac death (SCD) using nonlinear and time-frequency analyses from HRV signals

Elias Ebrahimzadeh et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Investigations show that millions of people all around the world die as the result of sudden cardiac death (SCD). These deaths can be reduced by using medical equipment, such as defibrillators, after detection. We need to propose suitable ways to assist doctors to predict sudden cardiac death with a high level of accuracy. To do this, Linear, Time-Frequency (TF) and Nonlinear features have been extracted from HRV of ECG signal. Finally, healthy people and people at risk of SCD are classified by k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) and Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP). To evaluate, we have compared the classification rates for both separate and combined Nonlinear and TF features. The results show that HRV signals have special features in the vicinity of the occurrence of SCD that have the ability to distinguish between patients prone to SCD and normal people. We found that the combination of Time-Frequency and Nonlinear features have a better ability to achieve higher accuracy. The experimental results show that the combination of features can predict SCD by the accuracy of 99.73%, 96.52%, 90.37% and 83.96% for the first, second, third and forth one-minute intervals, respectively, before SCD occurrence.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Block diagram of the proposed approach for prediction of SCD.
Figure 2
Figure 2. The ECG signal of SCD patient, from 2 minute before SCD event and several seconds after that.
Figure 3
Figure 3. ECG signal of a person on the moment of heart death.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Noise reduction of a typical ECG signal.
Figure 5
Figure 5. Extraction of HRV from ECG signal.
(a) One minute of the ECG signal of a healthy person. (b) Extraction of QRS-complexes. (c) The HRV signal which was extracted from (a). (d) One minute the ECG signal of a patient just before occurrence of SCD. (e) Extraction of QRS-complexes. (f) The HRV signal which was extracted from (d).
Figure 6
Figure 6. Spatial distribution of mean and STD features.
Figure 7
Figure 7. HRV signal and it’s power spectral density.
(a) Extracted HRV signal. (b) PSD of HRV signal, power in each frequency band is indicated.
Figure 8
Figure 8. Wigner Ville transform of the HRV signal.
(a) 2D view of a subject(b) 3D view of another subject.
Figure 9
Figure 9. Poincaré plot.
Figure 10
Figure 10. Poincaré plot.
(a) Normal persons. (b) SCD Persons.
Figure 11
Figure 11. Prediction of SCD by classification accuracy 4 minutes before ventricular failure (VF).
(a) ECG signal of a patient prone to SCD. (b) Prediction of SCD by computing the percentage of event probability.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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