Journal of Bioengineering & Biomedical Science

Numerical Estimation of Ejection Fraction from 12-lead ECG

Abstract

Fatemeh Razavipour, Mohammad hossein Nikoo and Firouzeh Abtahi

One of the key factors in assessing the health of heart muscles is measuring their ability to pump the blood out of ventricles in each contraction, which is called ejection fraction (EF). This factor is commonly estimated by a cardiologist when analyzing an echocardiogram, which is a time-consuming and expensive procedure that can also cause some inaccurate results. In this paper, we propose a numerical, short-time, and simple methodology to estimate the EF by calculating the areas and volume under ECG signals, which is a non-invasive, bedside heart monitoring procedure. We computed the areas and volume under the segments of normal ECG signals for 50 subjects by employing trapezoidal, Simpson’s, and Boole’s rules on three orthogonal planes of 12-lead ECG signal directions and five groups of leads for sagittal, frontal and transverse planes. We found a significant correlation (p<.001) between the values for EF parameters reported by cardiologists and our results, which we evaluated by calculating the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test, Canberra distance, Paired samples t-test, and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The results showed a significant correlation between the reported EF factor and the values derived by our proposed method.