Asmare Melkamu Hunegnaw, Chuma Amsalu Tomas, Varon Carolina, Woldehanna Frehiwot, Janssens Luc, Vanrumste Bart
eMedia Research Lab/STADIUS, Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven, Andreas Vesaliusstraat 13, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa Institute of Technology, Center of Biomedical Engineering, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Physiol Meas. 2023 Mar 1;44(2). doi: 10.1088/1361-6579/aca6cb.
. Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) is one of the highly prevalent heart diseases in developing countries that can affect the pericardium, myocardium, or endocardium. Rheumatic endocarditis is a common RHD variant that gradually deteriorates the normal function of the heart valves. RHD can be diagnosed using standard echocardiography or listened to as a heart murmur using a stethoscope. The electrocardiogram (ECG), on the other hand, is critical in the study and identification of heart rhythms and abnormalities. The effectiveness of ECG to identify distinguishing signs of rheumatic heart problems, however, has not been adequately examined. This study addressed the possible use of ECG recordings for the characterization of problems of the heart in RHD patients.. To this end, an extensive ECG dataset was collected from patients suffering from RHD (PwRHD), and healthy control subjects (HC). Bandpass filtering was used at the preprocessing stage. Each data was then standardized by removing its mean and dividing by its standard deviation. Delineation of the onsets and offsets of waves was performed using KIT-IBT open ECG MATLAB toolbox. PR interval, QRS duration, RR intervals, QT intervals, and QTc intervals were computed for each heartbeat. The median values of the temporal parameters were used to eliminate possible outliers due to missed ECG waves. The data were clustered in different age groups and sex. Another categorization was done based on the time duration since the first RHD diagnosis.. In 47.2% of the cases, a PR elongation was observed, and in 26.4% of the cases, the QRS duration was elongated. QTc was elongated in 44.3% of the cases. It was also observed that 62.2% of the cases had bradycardia.. The end product of this research can lead to new medical devices and services that can screen RHD based on ECG which could somehow assist in the detection and diagnosis of the disease in low-resource settings and alleviate the burden of the disease.
风湿性心脏病（RHD）是发展中国家高度流行的心脏病之一，可影响心包、心肌或心内膜。风湿性心内膜炎是一种常见的RHD变体，会逐渐损害心脏瓣膜的正常功能。RHD可通过标准超声心动图诊断，也可用听诊器听心杂音来诊断。另一方面，心电图（ECG）在研究和识别心律及异常方面至关重要。然而，ECG识别风湿性心脏问题特征性体征的有效性尚未得到充分研究。本研究探讨了ECG记录在表征RHD患者心脏问题方面的可能用途。为此，从风湿性心脏病患者（PwRHD）和健康对照受试者（HC）中收集了大量ECG数据集。在预处理阶段使用了带通滤波。然后通过去除均值并除以标准差对每个数据进行标准化。使用KIT - IBT开放式ECG MATLAB工具箱对波形的起始和结束进行描绘。计算每个心跳的PR间期、QRS时限、RR间期、QT间期和QTc间期。使用时间参数的中位数来消除因ECG波遗漏导致的可能异常值。数据按不同年龄组和性别进行聚类。另一种分类是根据首次诊断RHD后的时间长度进行的。在47.2%的病例中观察到PR间期延长，在26.4%的病例中QRS时限延长。44.3%的病例中QTc延长。还观察到62.2%的病例有心动过缓。本研究的最终成果可带来新的医疗设备和服务，能够基于ECG筛查RHD，这在某种程度上有助于在资源匮乏地区检测和诊断该疾病，并减轻疾病负担。
