Authors:
Valeria Villani
1
;
Antonio Fasano
2
;
Luca Vollero
2
;
Federica Censi
3
and
Giuseppe Boriani
4
Affiliations:
1
Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma and Italian National Institute of Health, Italy
;
2
Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Italy
;
3
Italian National Institute of Health, Italy
;
4
University of Bologna and Azienda Ospedaliera S. Orsola-Malpighi, Italy
Keyword(s):
ECG, Atrial fibrillation, P-wave variability.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Services
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Biomedical Signal Processing
;
Cardiovascular Signals
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Medical Image Detection, Acquisition, Analysis and Processing
Abstract:
Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice. Abnormal P-waves have been observed in patients prone to AF and the analysis of P-waves from surface electrocardiogram has been extensively used to identify patients prone to atrial arrhythmias. Measuring the temporal variability of Pwaves, i.e., the variation over time of morphological characteristics of single P-waves, may represent a useful method for characterizing and predicting AF cases. In this paper, we propose a method for the statistical analysis of P-waves variability. It is based on the evaluation of the empirical distribution function of differences energy among normalized P-waves. The proposed method seems promising for capturing atrial anomalies and identifying patients prone to AF.