A Machine Learning Shock Decision Algorithm for Use During Piston-Driven Chest Compressions

Goal: Accurate shock decision methods during piston-driven cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) would contribute to improve therapy and increase cardiac arrest survival rates. The best current methods are computationally demanding, and their accuracy could be improved. The objective of this work was to introduce a computationally efficient algorithm for shock decision during piston-driven CPR with increased accuracy. Methods: The study dataset contains 201 shockable and 844 nonshockable ECG segments from 230 cardiac arrest patients treated with the LUCAS-2 mechanical CPR device. Compression artifacts were removed using the state-of-the-art adaptive filters, and shock/no-shock discrimination features were extracted from the stationary wavelet transform analysis of the filtered ECG, and fed to a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Quasi-stratified patient wise nested cross-validation was used for feature selection and SVM hyperparameter optimization. The procedure was repeated 50 times to statistically characterize the results. Results: Best results were obtained for a six-feature classifier with mean (standard deviation) sensitivity, specificity, and total accuracy of 97.5 (0.4), 98.2 (0.4), and 98.1 (0.3), respectively. The algorithm presented a five-fold reduction in computational demands when compared to the best available methods, while improving their balanced accuracy by 3 points. Conclusions: The accuracy of the best available methods was improved while drastically reducing the computational demands. Significance: An efficient and accurate method for shock decisions during mechanical CPR is now available to improve therapy and contribute to increase cardiac arrest survival.