Synchronization of Conventional Electrocardiogram Recordings for Accurate Vectorcardiography Reconstruction

The vectorcardiogram (VCG) provides a comprehensive representation of the heart's electrical activity in 3D aiding in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. The conventional electrocardiogram (ECG) records twelve leads intermittently at intervals of 2.5 seconds, with lead II typically recorded continuously, which poses a challenge for reconstructing the VCG, as each lead's beats belong to different time instances. The purpose of this research is to propose and validate a methodology for accurately synchronizing the recording beats to reconstruct the VCG. To achieve this goal, a phantom was created to mimic the standard 12-lead ECG setup. The temporal offset of each beat from the first is calculated using cross-correlation utilizing the continuous lead and the same offset is applied to all leads, and finally reconstructing the VCG. The results demonstrate precise synchronization, as evidenced by Pearson correlation values of
$0.9959\pm 0.0034$
, an MAE of
$0.0077\pm 0.0024\ mV$
, and an RMSE of
$0.0119\pm 0.0038$
mV in the VCG reconstruction. This technique is essential for the accurate diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases and can be applied to conventional ECG recordings taken on paper to obtain VCG.