Reducing false arrhythmia alarms in the ICU

This study assessed the feasibility of using multimodal data, namely ECG, ABP and PLETH for reducing the incidence of false alarms in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology 2015 Challenge. Our approach relies on the annotation of heartbeats using all available channels for each alarm recording. In addition, we also combine ECG and ABP/PLETH channels to create additional signals for analysis. The heartbeat annotations are performed using the gqrs and wabp routines in the WFDB toolbox as well as our in-house algorithm. For ventricular tachycardia alarms, the morphology of the ECG signals for a specified window centered on the annotated heartbeats are also analyzed. Subsequently, the intervals between heartbeats are computed for each channel and for the combined signals. A majority voting scheme with an alarm-specified threshold optimized to the training dataset is used to determine if the triggered alarm is a true or false alarm.