Electrocardiographic diagnosis using digital differentiation.
Electrocardiograms have traditionally been used to obtain diagnostic information about the condition of the heart. Computerization of electrocardiograms and automatic identification of various key parameters is now undertaken in many hospitals and clinics. The technique of digital differentiation is now proposed as an extension of existing computer analysis programs to extract additional diagnostically useful information from electrocardiograms. The technique has been applied to computerized electrocardiograms from a group of subjects suffering from left ventricular hypertrophy, and has been shown to produce results which correlate significantly with the extent of the hypertrophy. It is suggested that incorporation of this technique into existing computer programs would provide the opportunity for large scale evaluation of the technique.