A system and method based on electrocardiogram (ECG) complexity analysis for real-time detecting shockable ventricular fibrillation (VF) and ventricular tachycardia (VT), and discriminating them from non-shockable tachyarrhythmia (e.g. supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) and atrial fibrillation (AF)) and high-frequency noise. In the disclosed invention, complexity measure CM (0 to 100), quantitatively characterizing the complexity nature of the non-linear dynamics underlying cardiac arrhythmia, is extracted from the sensed patient ECG signal using ECG complexity analysis. From the calculated complexity measure, by three thresholds (low complexity threshold (LCT), mediate complexity threshold (MCT), and high complexity threshold (HCT)), different kinds of tachyarrhythmia (i.e. heart rate (HR) above a preset rate threshold) and high-frequency noise are discriminated from each other: for non-shockable tachyarrhythmia, CM=LCT; for VT, LCTCM=MCT; for VF, MCTCM=HCT; and for high-frequency noise, HCTCM. The disclosed system and method can be used as a primary cardiac tachyarrhythmia detection scheme or as a backup system to reconfirm arrhythmia detection using conventional techniques.
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