Thorough Assessment of a P-wave Delineation Algorithm Through the Use of Diverse Electrocardiographic Databases

Abstract

[EN] Detailed analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG) recording allows to obtain relevant information about the heart state and its behavior. Indeed, the P-wave study has proven to be helpful in diagnosing many atrial electrical conduction disorders. However, manual delineation of this wave is a very time-consuming task, and a wide variety of automatic algorithms have been proposed for that purpose. The performance of these methods has been mostly validated on the QT database, since it contains manual annotations from clinical experts and is freely available at PhysioNet. Unfortunately, in the last years several authors have shown some major limitations of this database and this work hence presents a more robust validation of a previously published P-wave delineator. Thus, two novel databases which have been very recently made available to the scienti¿c community have been analyzed. The results show that the methods ability to detect P-waves is close to 100% in stable sinus rhythm episodes, but it decreases to 94% when the heart rhythm is irregular or consecutive P-waves exhibit notable morphological variations. Regarding the error between the annotations obtained automatically and those available as a reference, no relevant differences have been observed in terms of standard deviation, thus suggesting that the algorithm achieves a consistent delineation of the P-waves. Contrarily, a notable error has been noticed in average values, thus highlighting the need of a more extensive training for the P-wave delineator than that offered by the QT database.