Short-term reproducibility of parameters characterizing atrial fibrillatory waves

Abstract

Objective: To study reproducibility of f-wave parameters in terms of inter- and intrapatient variation.

Approach: Five parameters are investigated: dominant atrial frequency (DAF), f-wave amplitude, phase dispersion, spectral organization, and spatiotemporal variability. For each parameter, the variance ratio R, defined as the ratio between inter- and intrapatient variance, is computed; a larger R corresponds to better stability and reproducibility. The study population consists of 20 high-quality ECGs recorded from patients with atrial fibrillation (11/9 paroxysmal/persistent).

Main results: The well-established parameters DAF and f-wave amplitude were associated with considerably larger R-values (13.1 and 21.0, respectively) than phase dispersion (2.4), spectral organization (2.4), and spatiotemporal variability (2.7). The use of an adaptive harmonic frequency tracker to estimate the DAF resulted in a larger R (13.1) than did block-based maximum likelihood estimation (6.3).

Significance: This study demonstrates a noticeable difference in reproducibility among f-wave parameters, a result which should be taken into account when performing f-wave analysis.

Keywords: Atrial fibrillation; ECG; Reproducibility; Signal quality; f-wave characteristics.