Finding hidden patterns in complex ventricular ectopy

There has been much interest in analyzing the temporal organization of premature ventricular complexes. Different proposed mechanisms predict specific patterns. So far, these predictions have been mostly tested by inspecting short data strips. We present a novel method for representing cardiac time series as long as 24 hours using a temporal reorganization of the data. Our three dimensional rate-dependent histograms show the number of intervening beats or the interectopic time intervals for different sinus RR intervals, an approach that may be useful to uncover hidden patterns of ectopy and to classify different dynamics of ectopy.