Atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common arrhythmias, which does great harm to patients. Effective methods were urgently required to prevent the recurrence of AF. Four methods were used to analyze RR sequence in this paper, and differences between Pre-AF (preceding an episode of AF) and Normal period (far away from episodes of AF) were analyzed to find discriminative criterion. These methods are: power spectral analysis, approximate entropy (ApEn) and sample entropy (SpEn) analysis, recurrence analysis and time series symbolization. The RR sequence data used in this research were downloaded from the Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation Prediction Database. Supporting vector machine (SVM) classification was used to evaluate the methods by calculating sensitivity, specificity and accuracy rate. The results showed that the comprehensive utilization of recurrence analysis parameters reached the highest accuracy rate (95%); power spectrum analysis took second place (90%); while the results of entropy analyses and time sequence symbolization were not satisfactory, whose accuracy were both only 70%. In conclusion, the recurrence analysis and power spectrum could be adopted to evaluate the atrial chaotic state effectively, thus having certain reference value for prediction of AF recurrence.
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia in clinic, which can cause hemodynamic changes, heart failure and stroke, and seriously affect human life and health. As a self-promoting disease, the treatment of AF can become more and more difficult with the deterioration of the disease, and the early prediction and intervention of AF is the key to curbing the deterioration of the disease. Based on this, in this study, by controlling the dose of acetylcholine, we changed the AF vulnerability of five mongrel dogs and tried to assess it by analyzing the electrophysiology of atrial epicardium under different states of sinus rhythm. Here, indices from four aspects were proposed to study the atrial activation rule. They are the variability of atrial activation rhythm, the change of the earliest atrial activation, the change of atrial activation delay and the left-right atrial dyssynchrony. By using binary logistic regression analysis, multiple indices above were transformed into the AF inducibility, which were used to classify the signals during sinus rhythm. The sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of classification reached 85.7%, 95.8% and 91.7%, respectively. As the experimental results show, the proposed method has the ability to assess the AF vulnerability of atrium, which is of great clinical significance for the early prediction and intervention of AF.
The study of atrial fibrillation (AF) has been known as a hot topic of clinical concern. Body surface potential mapping (BSPM), a noninvasive electrical mapping technology, has been widely used in the study of AF. This study adopted 10 AF patients’ preoperative and postoperative BSPM data (each patient’s data contained 128 channels), and applied the autocorrelation function method to obtain the activation interval of the BSPM signals. The activation interval results were compared with that of manual counting method and the applicability of the autocorrelation function method was verified. Furthermore, we compared the autocorrelation function method with the commonly used fast Fourier transform (FFT) method. It was found that the autocorrelation function method was more accurate. Finally, to find a simple rule to predict the recurrence of atrial fibrillation, the autocorrelation function method was used to analyze the preoperative BSPM signals of 10 patients with persistent AF. Consequently, we found that if the patient’s proportion of channels with dominant frequency larger than 2.5 Hz in the anterior left region is greater than the other three regions (the anterior right region, the posterior left region, and the posterior right region), he or she might have a higher possibility of AF recurrence. This study verified the rationality of the autocorrelation function method for rhythm analysis and concluded a simple rule of AF recurrence prediction based on this method.