A robust delineation approach of electrocardiographic P waves

Abstract

This paper presents a new delineation approach of electrocardiographic P waves. The approach works directly on the digitized ECG. It computes the time derivative of the signal and detects the features of P wave using adaptive thresholding approach that overcome from the impact of high frequency noise present in the signal. Performance of the proposed P wave delineator is evaluated on Physionet QT database, which shows the detection sensitivity to 99.5% and positive predictivity to 99.89%. Lower values of mean error and standard deviation for onset and offset of P wave fiducials are obtained to 5.18±8.1 and 4.4±6.29, where units are in ms. These delineation results are outperformed in comparison to other methods on standard database.