A model for predicting emergency physician opinion of electrocardiogram tracing data quality

BACKGROUND Limited work has established an objective measure of ECG quality that correlates with physician opinion of the study. We seek to establish a threshold of acceptable ECG data quality for the purpose of ruling out STEMI derived from emergency physician opinion. METHODS A panel of three emergency physicians rated 240 12-Lead ECGs as being acceptable or unacceptable data quality. Each lead of the ECG had the following measurements recorded: baseline wander, QRS signal amplitude, and artifact amplitude. A lasso regression technique was used to create the model. RESULTS The area under the curve for the model using all 36 elements is 1.0, indicating a perfect fit. A simplified model using 22 terms has an area under the curve of 0.994. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrated that emergency physician opinion of ECG quality for the purpose of ruling out STEMI can be predicted through a regression model.