A Multi-Lead Fusion Method for the Accurate Delineation of QRS Complex Location in 12 Lead ECG Signal

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-lead fusion method for the accurate and automated detection of the QRS complex location in 12 lead ECG (Electrocardiogram) signals. The proposed multi-lead fusion method accurately delineates the QRS complex by the fusion of detected QRS complexes of the individual 12 leads. The proposed algorithm consists of two major stages. Firstly, the QRS complex location of each lead is detected by the single lead QRS detection algorithm. Secondly, the multi-lead fusion algorithm combines the information of the QRS complex locations obtained in each of the 12 leads. The performance of the proposed algorithm is improved in terms of Sensitivity and Positive Predictivity by discarding the false positives. The proposed method is validated on the ECG signals with various artifacts, inter and intra subject variations. The performance of the proposed method is validated on the long duration recorded ECG signals of St. Petersburg INCART database [1] with Sensitivity of 99.87% and Positive Predictivity of 99.96% and on the short duration recorded ECG signals of CSE (Common Standards for Electrocardiography) multilead database [2] with 100% Sensitivity and 99.13% Positive Predictivity.