Detection of atrial fibrillation in short-term ECG

Atrial fibrillation is diagnosed in 1-2% of the population, in next decades, it expects a significant increase in the number of patients with this arrhythmia in connection with the aging of the population and the higher incidence of some diseases that are considered as risk factors of atrial fibrillation. The aim of this work is to describe the problem of atrial fibrillation and the methods that allow its detection in the ECG record. In the first part of work there is a theory dealing with cardiac physiology and atrial fibrillation. There is also basic descreption of the detection of atrial fibrillation. In the practical part of work, there is described software for detection of atrial fibrillation, which is provided by BTL company. Furthermore, an atrial fibrillation detector is designed. Several parameters were selected to detect the variation of RR intervals. These are the parameters of the standard deviation, coefficient of skewness and kurtosis, coefficient of variation, root mean square of the successive differences, normalized absolute deviation, normalized absolute difference, median absolute deviation and entropy. Three different classification models were used: support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and discriminant analysis classification. The SVM classification model achieves the best results. Results of success indicators (sensitivity: 67.1%; specificity: 97.0%; F-measure: 66.8%; accuracy: 92.9%)