An Optimized Automatic P Wave Delineation Method based on Phasor Transform

Abstract

Accurate P wave detection is important for arrhythmia diagnosis, e.g. P wave absence or P duration for atrial fibrillation diagnosis and other atrial arrhythmias. Phasor transform is an effective method for ECG fiducial points delineation. It maps each ECG sample into a phasor to enhance slight variations and preserves morphology and magnitude characteristics. In this paper, we optimized the automatic P wave delineation method based on phasor transform in four aspects, i.e., signal denoising, wave localization, candidate points detection, and optimal points selection. In our experiments, the length of the search window and the degree of phasor transform were established through various trials. Especially, along with zero-crossing points of the phasor signal, intersections of the phasor signal and the original ECG signal are obtained as candidates, which make the most contribution to delineation results. For validation, the QT Database with 3194 P wave annotations from 105 records of two leads is adopted. As a result, we reached F1 scores of 94.67% and 93.56% with detection error rates (DERs) of 10.80% and 13.06% for P wave onset and offset points detection, respectively. The F1 score and DER for P peak detection under a tolerance of 75 ms were 95.33% and 9.46%, respectively, which outperforms other reproducible works and their combinations.