Visual data mining with self-organising maps for ventricular fibrillation analysis

Detection of ventricular fibrillation (VF) at an early stage is being deeply studied in order to lower the risk of sudden death and allows the specialist to have greater reaction time to give the patient a good recovering therapy. Some works are focusing on detecting VF based on numerical analysis of time-frequency distributions, but in general the methods used do not provide insight into the problem. However, this study proposes a new methodology in order to obtain information about this problem. This work uses a supervised self-organising map (SOM) to obtain visually information among four important groups of patients: VF (ventricular fibrillation), VT (ventricular tachycardia), HP (healthy patients) and AHR (other anomalous heart rates and noise). A total number of 27 variables were obtained from continuous surface ECG recordings in standard databases (MIT and AHA), providing information in the time, frequency, and time-frequency domains. self-organising maps (SOMs), trained with 11 of the 27 variables, were used to extract knowledge about the variable values for each group of patients. Results show that the SOM technique allows to determine the profile of each group of patients, assisting in gaining a deeper understanding of this clinical problem. Additionally, information about the most relevant variables is given by the SOM analysis.