Detection of sudden cardiac death using the adaptive spectral method on the T wave: An experimental study on public databases

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Marco Flores-Calero http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7507-3325
Melisa Pilla-Barrosso http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1441-1236

Abstract

T-wave alternans (TWA) analysis is one of the main techniques for determining whether an individual is at risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD). Among the existing methods for determining TWA is the adaptive spectral method (SM-Adaptive), which uses time-frequency distributions (TFD) for the analysis. The objective of the study is to apply the method on main public databases in order to detect the presence or absence of alternations, and to obtain quality parameters of the aforementioned method. The method was tested on synthetic signals, 90 signals without TWA and 450 with TWA; on the other hand, 10 signals from Physionet's TWADB database belonging to healthy patients and 26 signals from patients with risk factors associated to SCD were used. Tests with synthetic signals showed a sensitivity of 94.89%, specificity of 92.22% and accuracy of 94.44%. As for the tests in the database, the method exhibits an accuracy of 80.56%, which indicates that the SM-Adaptive method enables detecting TWA with an acceptable accuracy and, in addition, it shows greater robustness against noise and stationary data.