Objective: Based on cybernetics, a large system can be divided into subsystems, and the stability of each can determine the overall properties of the system. However, this stability analysis perspective has not yet been employed in electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. This is the first study to attempt to evaluate whether the stability of decomposed ECG subsystems can be analyzed in order to effectively investigate the overall performance of ECG signals, and aid in disease diagnosis.
Methods: We used seven different cardiac pathologies (myocardial infarction, cardiomyopathy, bundle branch block, dysrhythmia, hypertrophy, myocarditis, and valvular heart disease) to illustrate our method. Dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) was first used to decompose ECG signals into dynamic modes (DMs) which can be regarded as ECG subsystems. Then, the features related to the DMs stabilities were extracted, and nine common classifiers were implemented for classification of these pathologies.
Results: Most features were significant for differentiating the above-mentioned groups (p value<0.05 after Bonferroni correction). In addition, our method outperformed all existing methods for cardiac pathology classification.
Conclusion: We have provided a new spatial and temporal decomposition method, namely DMD, to study ECG signals.
Significance: Our method can reveal new cardiac mechanisms, which can contribute to the comprehensive understanding of its underlying mechanisms and disease diagnosis, and thus, can be widely used for ECG signal analysis in the future.