  We studied classification of human ECGs labelled as normal sinus rhythm,
ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia by means of support vector
machines in different representation spaces, using different observation
lengths. ECG waveform segments of duration 0.5-4 s, their Fourier magnitude
spectra, and lower dimensional projections of Fourier magnitude spectra were
used for classification. All considered representations were of much higher
dimension than in published studies. Classification accuracy improved with
segment duration up to 2 s, with 4 s providing little improvement. We found
that it is possible to discriminate between ventricular tachycardia and
ventricular fibrillation by the present approach with much shorter runs of ECG
(2 s, minimum 86% sensitivity per class) than previously imagined. Ensembles of
classifiers acting on 1 s segments taken over 5 s observation windows gave best
results, with sensitivities of detection for all classes exceeding 93%.
