Atrial Fibrillation Signal Analysis

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common type of cardiac arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice and is associated with an increased mortality and morbidity. Identification of the sources of AF has been a goal of researchers for over 20 years. Current treatment procedures such as Cardio version, Radio Frequency Ablation, and multiple drugs have reduced the incidence of AF. Nevertheless, the success rate of these treatments is only 35-40% of the AF patients as they have limited effect in maintaining the patient in normal sinus rhythm. The problem stems from the fact that there are no methods developed to analyze the electrical activity generated by the cardiac cells during AF and to detect the aberrant atrial tissue that triggers it. In clinical practice, the sources triggering AF are generally expected to be at one of the four pulmonary veins in the left atrium. Classifying the signals originated from four pulmonary veins in left atrium has been the mainstay of signal analysis in this thesis which ultimately leads to correctly locating the source triggering AF. Unlike many of the current researchers where they use ECG signals for AF signal analysis, we collect intra cardiac signals along with ECG signals for AF analysis. AF Signal collected from catheters placed inside the heart gives us a better understanding of AF characteristics compared to the ECG. . In recent years, mechanisms leading to AF induction have begun to be explored but the current state of research and diagnosis of AF is mainly about the inspection of 12 lead ECG, QRS subtraction methods, spectral analysis to find the fibrillation rate and limited to establishment of its presence or absence. The main goal of this thesis research is to develop methodology and algorithm for finding the source of AF. Pattern recognition techniques were used to classify the AF signals originated from the four pulmonary veins. The classification of AF signals recorded by a stationary intra-cardiac catheter was done based on dominant frequency, frequency distribution and normalized power. Principal Component Analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality and further, Linear Discriminant Analysis was used as a classification technique. An algorithm has been developed and tested during recorded periods of AF with promising results