Are You About To Die?
Atrial Activity Extraction From The Surface ECG
Are You About To Die? |
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| Project Background:The surface electrocardiogram (ECG) is used as the gold standard for diagnosing heart related disorders in medical practice. The ECG is a multi-component signal and consists of multiple waves, which can be traced back to different chambers (atria, ventricles) and different nodes (sinoatrial node, atrioventricular node) of the heart. The figure shows the electrical conduction inside the heart and corresponding ECG waves for one complete cardiac cycle (source: en.wikipedia.org). It is important to decompose the ECG into its original components in order to isolate and analyse some of the disorders.One of the major challenges is to extract the atrial activity from the surface ECG, as it has substantially low amplitude within the ECG. Extracting the atrial activity is highly useful in analysing atria related disorders like Atrial Fibrillation and Atrial Flutter. Several approaches have been taken for this purpose, including average beat subtraction, template matching and spatiotemporal cancellation of ventricular activity. Recently, principal component analysis and independent component analysis techniques have been used to estimate the atrial activity. All the above mentioned methods have pros and cons and none of the methods was capable of achieving a totally satisfactory solution. |
| Project Goals:The goals of this project are to quantitatively analyse existing techniques for different ECG data banks and find a better method of extracting atrial activity by combining different techniques. For a creative student, there is a scope for coming up with novel ideas and developing his/her own algorithms as well. At the end of the project, the final algorithm will be implemented in Matlab, with the possibility of publishing the work. |
| Prerequisites:The student is expected to have a good mathematical background, programming skills and problem solving skills. The ability to program in Matlab will be helpful but not essential. The student is not expected have any prior knowledge in medicine or biology. |
| Student’s Gain:Bio-medical signal processing is an emerging research field and the student will be exposed to real life engineering problems in medicine and biology. The project has important clinical implications, and thus novel work will be well rewarded in both medical and engineering research communities. |
This is one of the projects available under ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science - Summer research scholar program 2008/2009.
Undergraduate and honours students who are currently enrolled at a university in Australia or New Zealand are eligible. Click
