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Figure 2 | BioMedical Engineering OnLine

Figure 2

From: Reduction of CPR artifacts in the ventricular fibrillation ECG by coherent line removal

Figure 2

Windowed Fourier transform of ECG for one particular chosen VF-experiment in a pig model. The power (in units of decibel [dB]) is shown in a color coded spectrogram (upper panel), with 'red' representing high power, 'yellow' intermediate power and 'blue' low power. Time [sec] is given on the x-axis, frequency [Hz] on the y-axis. Fibrillation starts at ~80 sec, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after ~310 sec. CPR is performed with approximately ~110/min = ~1.8 Hz. The respective artifacts at ~1.8 Hz are clearly visible in the spectrogram, together with the harmonics ~3.7 Hz, ~5.5 Hz etc. The "fibrillation band" corresponding to VF-ECG during the first phase of the experiment shows the typical "S-form", starting at ~10 Hz, decreasing to ~8 Hz, and increasing again during the first 240 sec of VF. Afterwards, the "fibrillation band" would continuously decrease if no CPR were performed. CPR increases the frequency range of the "fibrillation band". Three different parameters are computed for the VF-ECG with respect to the frequency window [4.33 Hz, 30 Hz]: mean frequency (blue), median frequency (magenta), and dominant frequency (black). The lower frequency of the frequency window (= 4.33 Hz) is shown as a straight dashed black line. Before start of CPR, the mean, median and dominant frequency follow the "fibrillation band". After start of CPR, the dominant frequency remains at the second harmonic of CPR-frequency at ~5.5 Hz. In addition (after start of CPR), the mean and median frequency do not at all follow the "fibrillation band" but are rather influenced by the harmonics of the CPR-artifacts. The lower panel of the figure shows the relative power in the frequency window [0.33 Hz, 2 Hz] as compared to the frequency window [0.33, 30 Hz], denoted as the "low frequency content" of the signal.

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