Method and apparatus for morphology-based arrhythmia classification using cardiac and other physiological signals

A tachyarrhythmia detection and classification system, comprising:

• a cardiac sensing circuit to sense at least one cardiac signal;
• a tachyarrhythmia detector, coupled to the cardiac sensing circuit, to detect a tachyarrhythmia episode from the at least one cardiac signal;
• one or more physiological sensors to sense one or more physiological signals;
• a physiological parameter generator, coupled to the one or more physiological sensors, to derive one or more physiological parameters from the one or more physiological signals;
• wherein the one or more physiologicaI signals comprise at least one hemodynamic signal indicative of hemodynamic performance, the one or more physiological parameters comprise a hemodynamic stability parameter (S) indicative of a level of hemodynamic stability, the one or more physiological sensors comprise a hemodynamic sensor to sense the at least one hemodynamic signal, the physiological parameter generator is adapted to derive the hemodynamic stability parameter (S) from the at least one hemodynamic signal, and the threshold generator is adapted to adjust a dynamically adjustable beat classification threshold (T) using the hemodynamic stability parameter (S):
• and
• a morphology-based tachyarrhythmia classification module coupled to the tachyarrhythmia detector, the morphology-based tachyarrhythmia classification module including:
• a feature extractor, coupled to the cardiac sensing circuit, to extract arrhythmic morphological features of an arrhythmic heart beat of the detected tachyarrhythmia episode from the at least one cardiac signal;
• a similarity analyzer, coupled to the cardiac sensing circuit, to compute a measure of similarity between the arrhythmic morphological features and template morphological features of a template heart beat of a known type cardiac rhythm;
• a classifier, coupled to the similarity analyzer, to classify the arrhythmic heart beat using the measure of similarity and the beat classification threshold (T);
• and
• a threshold generator, coupled to the physiological parameter generator and the classifier, to adjust the beat classification threshold (T) using the one or more physiological parameters.