A method for detection of atrial fibrillation using RR intervals

This work describes a method for automatic detection of atrial fibrillation (AF) based on RR intervals. We define ΔRR to be the difference between successive RR intervals. The standard density histograms of RR and ΔRR intervals are determined from data in the MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation/flutter database. The present method estimates the similarity between the standard density histograms and a best density histogram by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test. The algorithm returns significance (p) of difference between given histograms. If the p value is smaller than a value (P_c), the test density histogram is significantly different from the standard density histogram. If the test density histogram is not significantly different from the standard density histogram, we say the data is AF: Using the standard density histogram of ΔRR with P_c=0.01, the average sensitivity is 93.2% and the average specificity is 96.7%