Robust multiple cardiac arrhythmia detection through bispectrum analysis

This paper investigates the use of Higher Order Spectra parameters to identify the most common multiple cardiac arrhythmias. In detail, we calculated magnitude of bispectrum, three values of bispectrum entropy, mean and variance of the phase of bispectrum integrated over a particular region wherein no bispectrum aliasing is assumed. This set of features is used to distinguish normal QRS from five different classes of arrhythmia over a large amount of normal and pathologic ECG signals. An accurate parametric and non-parametric analysis of these feature distributions is also performed in order to identify the optimum classifier. Experimental tests were performed on signals gathered from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmias Database, and mean and standard deviation of all confusion matrixes obtained from 20 steps of cross validation are shown. Results showed that the bispectrum is high performance, reliable and robust method to identify arrhythmias.