Determining Dominant Frequency with Data-Adaptive Windows

Abstract. Measurement of activation rates in cardiac electrograms is commonly done though estimating the frequency of the sinusoid with the greatest power. This frequency, commonly referred to as Dominant Frequency, is generally estimated using the short-time Fourier Transform with a window of fixed size. In this work a new short-time Fourier transform method with a data-adaptive window is introduced. Experiments are conducted with both synthetic and real data. Results for the former case are compared with current state-of-the-art methods. Given the difficulty in identifying activation points in electrograms, experiments reported in the literature have so far used only synthetic data. The new method is tested by application to real data, with true activation rates determined manually. Substantial improvement is observed. An error analysis is provided.