Gating of false alarms in myocardial ischemia monitoring using ST segment deviation trend estimator

A false alarm gating system for myocardial ischemia monitoring is proposed to mitigate false alarms resulting from inaccurate estimates of the ST deviation in the electrocardiogram (ECG). The proposed system employs multiple estimates of the ST segment deviation and correlates the trends between these estimates; low correlation can be indicative of an inaccurate estimate. Three correlation methods were considered: 1) Pearson correlation coefficient, 2) Kendall rank correlation, and 3) Spearman rank correlation. The proposed system was tested using 16 ECG signals from the Long-Term ST Database available on Physionet. The baseline performance of the commercial bedside monitor was 78 true alarms and 66 false alarms with precision and recall of 0.54 and 0.79, respectively. Using Spearman rank correlation, the proposed system balanced the gating of false alarms while minimizing the loss of true alarms. The system's true and false alarm rates were 71 and 30, respectively, while attaining precision and recall of 0.70 and 0.72, respectively.