Ventricular Fibrillation Waveform Analysis During Chest Compressions to Predict Survival From Cardiac Arrest

BACKGROUND:Quantitative measures of the ventricular fibrillation (VF) ECG waveform can assess myocardial physiology and predict cardiac arrest outcomes, making these measures a candidate to help guide resuscitation. Chest compressions are typically paused for waveform measure calculation because compressions cause ECG artifact. However, such pauses contradict resuscitation guideline recommendations to minimize cardiopulmonary resuscitation interruptions. We evaluated a comprehensive group of VF measures with and without ongoing compressions to determine their performance under both conditions for predicting functionally-intact survival, the study’s primary outcome. METHODS:Five-second VF ECG segments were collected with and without chest compressions before 2755 defibrillation shocks from 1151 out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients. Twenty-four individual measures and 3 combination measures were implemented. Measures were optimized to predict functionally-intact survival (Cerebral Performance Category score ≤2) using 460 training cases, and their performance evaluated using 691 independent test cases. RESULTS:Measures predicted functionally-intact survival on test data with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve ranging from 0.56 to 0.75 (median, 0.73) without chest compressions and from 0.53 to 0.75 (median, 0.69) with compressions (P