The use of adaptive line enhancement for the beat-to-beat detection of late potentials: an evaluation

Late potentials, which occur after the QRS complex in the ECG waveform, have attracted much interest over the last decade. Although usually recovered by signal averaging, some recent studies have commented upon the use of adaptive filtering techniques for the detection of ventricular late potentials on a beat-to-beat basis. This paper reports upon an evaluation of the technique of adaptive line enhancement (ALE) in this role. The technique was evaluated using both actual and simulated ECG signals. The ensemble of our results suggests that the technique is not suited to this application. The experimental results were found to be in agreement with theoretical predictions of ALE behaviour.