Online neural network training for automatic ischemia episode detection

Myocardial ischemia is caused by a lack of oxygen and nutrients to the contractile cells and may lead to myocardial infarction with its severe consequence of heart failure and arrhythmia. An electrocardiogram (ECG) represents a recording of changes occurring in the electrical potentials between different sites on the skin as a result of the cardiac activity. Since the ECG is recorded easily and non-invasively, it becomes very important to provide means of reliable ischemia detection. Ischemic changes of the ECG frequently affect the entire repolarization wave shape. In this paper we propose a new classification methodology that draws from the disciplines of clustering and artificial neural networks, and apply it to the problem of myocardial ischemia detection. The results obtained are promising.