R-Wave Singularity: A New Morphological Approach to the Analysis of Cardiac Electrical Dyssynchrony

R-wave singularity (RWS) measures the intermittence or discontinuousness of R waves. It has been broadly used in QRS (QRS complex of electrocardiogram) detection, electrocardiogram (ECG) beats classification, etc. In this article, we novelly developed RWS to the analysis of QRS morphology as the measurement of ventricular dyssynchrony and tested the hypothesis that RWS could enhance the discrimination between control and acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients. Holter ECG recordings were obtained from the Telemetric and Holter ECG Warehouse database, among which database Normal was extracted as normal controls (n = 202) and database AMI (n = 93) as typical subjects of autonomic nervous system dysfunction and cardiac electrical dyssynchrony with high risk for cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. Experimental results demonstrate that RWS measured by Lipschitz exponent calculated from 5-min Holter recordings was significantly less negative in early AMI and late AMI than that in Normal subjects for overall, elderly, and elderly male groups, which suggested the heterogeneous depolarization of the ventricular myocardium during AMI. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses show that combined with heart rate variability parameters, Lipschitz exponent provides higher accuracy in distinguishing between the patients with AMI and healthy control subjects for overall, elderly, elderly male, and elderly female groups. In summary, our study demonstrates the significance of using RWS to probe the cardiac electrical dyssynchrony for AMI. Lipschitz exponent may be valuable and complementary for existing cardiac resynchronization therapy and autonomic nervous system assessment.