Analysis of ventricular late potentials prior to the onset of ventricular tachyarrhythmias: end of QRS point detector

Ventricular tachyarrithmias are one of the most dangerous cardiac pathologies often causing sudden death. Studies for the prediction of these events are based on feature extraction prior to their initiation. Ventricular late potentials are considered a marker of abnormality in ventricular function which can cause ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation. A ventricular late potential detector is proposed in this paper based on the continuous wavelet transform. Simulated ECGs with added artificial ventricular late potentials was used to develop and test the proposed algorithm. A second study of the ECGs of 8 CCU patients who subsequently developed a ventricular tachyarrhythmia was then carried out. However, no ventricular late potentials were found for this small group of patients using the proposed algorithm