Analysis of cardiac beats using higher order spectra

Abstract

For early diagnosis of the heart failures, the electrocardiography (ECG) is the most common method because of its simplicity and cost. Computer based analysis of ECG provides reliable and efficient tools in diagnostics of arrhythmias. With this objective there are lots of studies on automatic and semi-automatic ECG analysis. Like many biosignals, ECG signals are nonlinear in nature, higher order spectral analysis (HOS) is known to be a very good tool for the analysis of nonlinear systems producing good noise immunity. Thus in this study, HOS analysis of ECG signals of normal heart rate, right bundle branch block, paced beat, left bundle block branch and atrial premature beats have been studied in order to reveal the complex dynamics of ECG signals using the tools of nonlinear systems theory. Some of the general characteristics for each of these classes in the bispectrum and bicoherence plot for visual observation have been presented. For the extraction of R-R intervals, well known Pan-Tompkins algorithm has been used and three higher order statistical parameters of skewness, kurtosis and variance from these features have been computed. These features with statistical parameters fed into artificial neural network classifier (ANN) and obtained an average accuracy of 94.9%.