A novel approach that employs a complexity-based sequential hypothesis testing (SHT) technique for real-time detection of ventricular fibrillation (VF) and ventricular tachycardia (VT) is presented. A dataset consisting of a number of VF and VT electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings drawn from the MIT-BIH database was adopted for such an analysis. It was split into two smaller datasets for algorithm training and testing, respectively. Each ECG recording was measured in a 10-second interval. For each recording, a number of overlapping windowed ECG data segments were obtained by shifting a 5-second window by a step of 1 second. During the windowing process, the complexity measure (CM) value was calculated for each windowed segment and the task of pattern recognition was then sequentially performed by the SHT procedure. A preliminary test conducted using the database produced optimal overall predictive accuracy of . The algorithm was also implemented on a commercial embedded DSP controller, permitting a hardware realization of real-time ventricular arrhythmia detection.
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