Desenvolvimento de sistema para detecção de arritmias cardíacas para auxílio ao diagnóstico médico à distância.

Abstract

Electrocardiography (ECG) is a kind of medical exam that makes use of electric signals captures from a patient’s skin. Physicians diagnose cardiac diseases most often using ECG, although ECG diagnosis is known to be time consuming and to require strong medical expertise. At northeastern Brazil, in inland cities, there is a lack of medical professionals to supply the healthcare demand on ECG examinations. In emergency situations, the lack of medical specialists can lead to delay in proper clinical examination and, thus, proper diagnosis and treatment, putting patient lifes in risk. In order to solve this issue, in this work accomplished at NUTES - UEPB as part of a mandatory undergraduate internship, we propose a tool named Intelligent Detection of Arrhythmic Heartbeats on ECG, or IDAH-ECG, which consists of a system comprised of modules for portable ECG exam acquisition, server monitoring, cloud-based signal processing, and short message service (SMS) notification. The system makes use of a portable ECG device to capture the ECG signal during an examination, uploads the exams to a server, which proceeds to process the signals and to distinguish arrhythmic heartbeats from healthy, or normal ones. Upon detection of any abnormalities, a SMS is sent to available medical professionals in the area, which then can use the message to access the cloud-based database of examinations, evaluate the acquired examination and then promptly decide how to proceed with the patient. This document focuses on the signal processing aspect of the system which makes use of Finite Impulse Response and Discrete Wavelet Filtering, Principal Component Analysis and Artificial Neural Networks to accomplish arrhythmia detection with accuracy of 96.48%, sensitivity of 98.7%, using ten-fold cross-validation and Monte Carlo testing over the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database.