A new three-dimensional Time Vector Electrocardiogram Modeling and its Applications

Although ECG signals contain rich enough information about the heart function, neither the clinical cardiologists nor researchers and engineers with their developed algorithms can illustrate all of this hidden information without some ECG pre-processing attempts. The standard 12- lead ECG signals represent the magnitudes of the heart's electrical activity at any instant in a cardiac cycle. Still, the direction of these signals is not clearly shown in ECG leads. On the other hand, in VCG, we have both the magnitude and direction of the heart's electrical signal, but the time is hidden. In this paper, a new approach has been proposed that, without requiring complicated calculations, represents and visualizes the magnitude and direction of the heart's electrical activity as a function of time. Unlike the normal 2-dimensional ECG for several leads, in this new 3-dimensional proposed ECG(Time Vector Electrocardiogram), any two arbitrary frontal leads are shown versus time. The resulting curve is independent of the selected leads; thus, only a single 3-dimensional curve is obtained, which contains and illustrates more information about the heart function. Some applications of the proposed method are presented in this paper by using the ECG data for patients from the G12EC database. If this new approach is welcomed by cardiologists and field experts, we believe that it would greatly assist them in diagnosing heart behavior and its possible abnormalities more clearly and much faster.