Resuscitation
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Multicenter Study
The effect of the localisation of an underlying ST-elevation myocardial infarction on the VF-waveform: A multi-centre cardiac arrest study.
In cardiac arrest, ventricular fibrillation (VF) waveform characteristics such as amplitude spectrum area (AMSA) are studied to identify an underlying myocardial infarction (MI). Observational studies report lower AMSA-values in patients with than without underlying MI. Moreover, experimental studies with 12-lead ECG-recordings show lowest VF-characteristics when the MI-localisation matches the ECG-recording direction. However, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA)-studies with defibrillator-derived VF-recordings are lacking. ⋯ This multi-centre VF-waveform OHCA-study showed significantly lower AMSA in case of underlying STEMI, with a more pronounced difference for inferior than for anterior STEMI. Confirmative studies on the impact of STEMI-localisation on the VF-waveform are warranted, and might contribute to earlier diagnosis of STEMI during VF.
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Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) data debriefing and clinical research often require the retrospective analysis of large datasets containing defibrillator files from different vendors and clinical annotations by the emergency medical services. ⋯ An automated methodology was validated to accurately compute CPR metrics in large and heterogeneous OHCA datasets. Automated processing of defibrillator files and the associated clinical annotations enables the aggregation and analysis of CPR data from multiple sources.