Identification of Cardiac Ischemia using bispectral analysis of ECG

Cardiac Ischemia (CI) is the most common type of cardiac arrhythmia. CI is caused by narrowing of arteries which makes less oxygenated blood to reach the heart muscle. This condition may lead to heart attack with no prior warning. This paper introduces the work that has been done to distinguish the Electrocardiogram (ECG) of a normal healthy person from that of CI patient. Normal spectral analysis of ECG provides only the power within frequency components but doesn´t give any phase relations. Bispectral analysis - Bispectrum, Bicoherence and Quadratic Phase Coupling techniques are used to detect and characterize phase coupled harmonics in ECG. Normal Sinus Rhythm Data is obtained from MIT-BIH Database. CI data is obtained from European ST-T Database. The algorithm was tested on MIT-BIH database and European ST-T Database. This concept can be utilized to identify other heart diseases also.