Adaption of the standard 12-lead ECG system focusing on atrial electrical activity

Abstract

An adaptation is presented of the positioning of some of the electrodes of the standard 12-lead ECG, aimed at extracting more information on atrial activity. It uses new positions for four of the six precordial electrodes, anchored to the remaining two. Its performance was tested by applying it to ECG signals during atrial fibrillation, simulated by means of a biophysical model of human atria and thorax. This enabled the analysis to be carried out without the interference of the ventricular activity. The signals simulated on each of the two lead systems, denoted here as ECG and ACG (atriocardiogram), were compared by studying the singular values of the data matrix (size 9timesN) representing the independent information in the data. After normalization with respect to the first singular value, the singular value spectrum of the ACG lied well above that of the ECG data. The results indicate that the ACG lead system provides more information on the atrial electric activity than the standard 12-lead ECG configuration