Quantitative evaluation of a wavelet-based method in ventricular late potential detection

Ventricular late potentials (VLPs) are low-amplitude, high-frequency waveforms appearing in the terminal part of the QRS complex in electrocardiogram (ECG) of patients who are susceptible to ventricular tachycardia and sudden cardiac death, after surviving myocardial infarction. Accordingly, VLP detection presents a prominent non-invasive marker for some cardiac diseases clinically. This paper proposes a VLP detection method based on the wavelet transform and investigates its performance. In this method, a modified vector magnitude waveform is formed using discrete wavelet transform for each high-resolution ECG (HRECG) record; then, by applying the continuous wavelet transform to the QRS complex end part in this waveform, a feature vector is extracted from the resultant time-scale plot. This wavelet-based feature vector is processed by principle component analysis to reduce its dimensionality. Finally, a supervised feedforward artificial neural network, trained by a proper set of these feature vectors, is employed as a classifier. To evaluate the proposed method performance, a HRECG database consisting of the real VLP-negative and simulated VLP-positive patterns is used. In a comparative approach, different VLP detection techniques including the conventional time-domain method, developed by Simson, and some methods utilizing distinct diagnostic features are also applied to this database to investigate the capability of the proposed method in VLP analysis more completely. The results show the proposed method, employing the wavelet transform in both pre-processing and feature extraction stages, reveals high evaluation criteria (accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity) and is qualified to detect VLPs.