RELIABILITY OF FIBRILLATION DETECTION ALGORITHMS IN AUTOMATIC EXTERNAL DEFIBRILLATORS (AEDs)

A central component in automatic external defibrillators (AED) is the detection of ventricular fibrillation by means of appropriate detection algorithms. In the scientific literature there exists a wide variety of methods and ideas for handling this task. To test the quality of an algorithm for ECG analysis, it is essential to do this with a large amount of commented data under equal conditions. For our investigation we used the BIH-MIT data bank and the CU data bank. In this test we analyzed eleven different fibrillation detection algorithms. The results are expressed in the quality parameters sensitivity and specificity. They are obtained by comparing the decision suggested by the algorithm with the annotated decision suggested by cardiologists. The cardiologists’ decisions are considered as true. We distinguish only between ventricular fibrillation and no ventricular fibrillation, since the annotations do not include a differentiation between ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. The closer the quality parameters are to 1, the better the algorithm works.