Arrhythmia discrimination in implantable cardioverter defibrillators using support vector machines applied to a new representation of electrograms.

Arrhythmia classification remains a major challenge for appropriate therapy delivery in implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs). The purpose of this paper is to present a new algorithm for arrhythmia discrimination based on a statistical classification by support vector machines of a novel 2-D representation of electrograms (EGMs) named spatial projection of tachycardia (SPOT) EGMs. SPOT-based discrimination algorithm provided sensitivity and specificity of 98.8% and 91.3%, respectively, on a test database. A simplified version of the algorithm is also presented, which can be directly implemented in the ICD.