Algorithm for life-threatening arrhythmias detection with reduced false alarms

With the increasing quality and costs of health services a lot of attention is put to provide excellent care on the ICU. However, the amount of false alarms of cardiac episodes still outnumbers the true ones significantly. The advanced analysis of multiple signals registered by monitoring system might enable reduction of the false alarms. We analyzed 750 multi-channel recordings from the PhysioNet Challenge 2015 labeled either ´true alarm´ or ´false alarm´. In our algorithm there are multiple methods enabling to determine the location of R peaks in ECG signal, basing mostly on RS slopes. Similar slope detection method is performed for other channels provided. In case of signals where it is not possible to detect QRS complexes direct signal morphology assessment is used. These steps allowed us to obtain information needed to verifY if the alarm was true or false. The final scores of PhysioNet Challenge 2015 were: 57. 72 for Real-time event and 63.69 for the Retrospective one.