Study of the noise-ventricular late potentials sensibility on the wigner distribution time-frequency plane

Abstract

Ventricular late potentials are electrocardiographic components that are attenuated, fragmented and delayed when the ventricular depolarization wave reaches any tissue damaged by a heart attack. These potentials are often studied for use as markers of sudden cardiac death risk. The method most used to predict this risk is the classical time domain. However, this method has a great sensitivity to noise, thereby producing low values in prognosis. We found that using the cross terms of the Wigner distribution, the identification of late potentials becomes less vulnerable to the noise present in the electrocardiogram.