Proposal of Sudden Death Indicators based on Information Measures from ECG Signals

Abstract

Abstract. Sudden death of millions of people every year is a worldwide problem of interest. There is a lack of evidence about the waveform that precedes the event of sudden death in the electrocardiogram. The aim of this work is to present a pilot study that may provide important clues to the characterize the electrocardiogram signal of the sudden death syndrome. Given a database containing electrocardiograms records from people either with normal sinus rhythm or who died suddenly, for each time windowed signal the normalized Permutation Shannon Entropy is calculated using an embedding time delay that depends on the signal. Then, the autocorrelation with the squared root of the successive differences between heartbeats is used to construct a plane in which the cloud points of both interest groups are clearly differentiated.