The exploitation of spatial topographies for atrial signal extraction in atrial fibrillation ECGs.
Résumé
The accuracy in the extraction of the atrial activity (AA) from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals recorded during atrial fibrillation (AF) episodes plays an important role in the analysis and characterization of atrial arrhythmias. The present contribution puts forward a method for AA signal extraction based on a blind source separation (BSS) formulation. The latter exploits spatial information on the different components in the ECG related or not to AF. The source directions or spatial topographies of the components not related to AF are used to determine the nullspace of the AA, so that the topographies related to AA become more suitable to describe AF sources. The comparative performance of the method is evaluated on real data recorded from patients with noticeable AF. The AA extraction quality of the proposed technique is comparable to that of previous algorithms.