Efficacy of a reduced lead set for pre-hospital triage of thrombolytic strategies

In emergency care situations, recording all leads of the 12-lead ECG is often not possible due io technical and organizational restrictions. The recording of a subset of leads and subsequent synthesis of rhe absent leads might be a solution to these problems. The goal of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a reduced lead set, consisting of leads I, 11, V2, and V5. The lead subset was derived from a data set of 12-lead ECGs recorded from parients with a suspected acute myocardial infarction prior to hospitalization. Performance was evaluated by comparing the originally recorded leads and reconstructed leads using correlation coeflcients and STdigerences. Several clinically important decision rules for detection and pre-hospital treatment were evaluated on the original and reconstructed 12-lead ECGs and accuracy was determined. This study shows that high agreement, correlation coeflcients and small STdifferences can be obtained between the original and reconstructed leads.