Measuring P-wave morphological variability for AF-prone patients identification

Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice. Abnormal P-waves have been observed in patients prone to AF and the analysis of P-waves from surface electrocardiogram has been extensively used to identify patients prone to atrial arrhythmias. Measuring the temporal variability of P- waves, i.e., the variation over time of morphological characteristics of single P-waves, may represent a useful method for characterizing and predicting AF cases. In this paper, we propose a method for the statistical analysis of P-waves variability. It is based on the evaluation of the empirical distribution function of differences energy among normalized P-waves. The proposed method seems promising for capturing atrial anomalies and identifying patients prone to AF.