Improvement of Risk Assessment of Sudden Cardiac Death by the Integration of Risk Indices

Abstract

This study proposes a method of cardiac risk assessment based on the long term Holter ECG recordings. Conventional risk assessment indices are obtained by short term ECG record recorded at the clinical laboratory in the hospital. Recently, characterization of the long term ECG record draw a considerable attention. This research adopted several such indices based on the long term ECG record for the cardiac risk assessment. Namely, Indices based on QT and RR intervals, such as cRRI-QT, RRI-Amplitude, ARP are introduced and examined. Logistic regression analysis is applied to those indices obtained from 11 cardiac high risk (SCD-H), 14 low-risk (SCD-L) patients and 25 control subjects (Control). It has been shown that the combination of RRI-amplitude, ARP and cRRI-QT yielded the best classification accuracy. Sensitivity and specificity were larger than 0.8 except for SCD-L sensitivity being 0.7. The number of cases should be increased to validate the result.