Preliminary study on the discrimination of atrial fibrillation and regular tachycardias using a measure of non-uniformity in intra-atrial leads

An attempt was made to determine whether a measure of atrial synchrony can be found to classify atrial fibrillation and regular atrial tachycardias in intraatrial leads. A method for quantifying the nonuniformity of atrial activity in intraatrial leads was defined as the bandwidth between threshold crossings around the peak in the 2-10-Hz region of the power spectrum. Twelve overlapping 2-s segments were recorded for each patient and used to calculate nonuniformity. The nonuniformity ranged from 0.88 to 4.69 Hz for atrial fibrillation and from 0.88 to 2.93 Hz for regular tachycardias. The nonuniformity of the averaged power spectra for each patient was also calculated and ranged from 3.22 to 0.98 Hz for atrial fibrillation and 1.17 to 2.93 Hz for regular tachycardias with no overlap. >