Summary
Objectives: Ventricular fibrillation (VF) is a life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia and within
of minutes of its occurrence, optimal timing of countershock therapy is highly warranted
to improve the chance of survival. This study was designed to investigate whether
the autoregressive (AR) estimation technique was capable to reliably predict countershock
success in VF cardiac arrest patients.
Methods: ECG data of 1077 countershocks applied to 197 cardiac arrest patients with out-of-hospital
and in-hospital cardiac arrest between March 2002 and July 2004 were retrospectively
analyzed. The ECG from the 2.5 s interval of the precountershock VF ECG was used for
computing the AR based features Spectral Pole Power (SPP) and Spectral Pole Power
with Dominant Frequency weighing (SPPDF) and Centroid Frequency (CF) and Amplitude
Spectrum Area (AMSA) based on Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT).
Results: With ROC AUC values up to 84.1 % and diagnostic odds ratio up to 19.12 AR based features
SPP and SPPDF have better prediction power than the FFT based features CF (80.5 %;
6.56) and AMSA (82.1 %; 8.79).
Conclusions: AR estimation based features are promising alternatives to FFT based features for
countershock outcome when analyzing human data.
Keywords
Ventricular fibrillation - prediction - counter-shock success - autoregressive spectral
estimator