Structured prediction for differentiating between normal rhythms, ventricular tachycardia, and ventricular fibrillation in the ECG.

Recent studies have been performed on feature selection for diagnostics between non-ventricular rhythms and ventricular arrhythmias, or between non-ventricular fibrillation and ventricular fibrillation. However they did not assess classification directly between non-ventricular rhythms, ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation, which is important in both a clinical setting and preclinical drug discovery. In this study it is shown that in a direct multiclass setting, the selected features from these studies are not capable at differentiating between ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation. A high dimensional feature space, Fourier magnitude spectra, is proposed for classification, in combination with the structured prediction method conditional random fields. An improvement in overall accuracy, and sensitivity of every category under investigation is achieved.