Characterization of cardiac arrhythmias by variational mode decomposition technique

Automatic detection of cardiac abnormalities in early stage is a popular area of research for decades. In this work a novel algorithm for detection of cardiac arrhythmia is proposed using variational mode decomposition (VMD). Arrhythmia is a crucial abnormality of heart in which the rhythmic disorder may lead to sudden cardiac arrest. Existing algorithms for arrhythmia detection are based on accuracy of detection of fiducial points, parameter selection and extraction, quality of classifier and other factors. Unlike other works, proposed method tries to characterize both atrial and ventricular arrhythmias simultaneously and independently from the segmented sections of the signal. VMD, being able to separate closely spaced frequencies, has a good potential to be useful to provide significant features in transformed domain. Unique feature combinations are also proposed to characterize different arrhythmic events.