A model for predicting emergency physician opinion of electrocardiogram tracing data quality.

Background: Limited work has established an objective measure of ECG quality that correlates with physician opinion of the study. We seek to establish a threshold of acceptable ECG data quality for the purpose of ruling out STEMI derived from emergency physician opinion.

Methods: A panel of three emergency physicians rated 240 12-Lead ECGs as being acceptable or unacceptable data quality. Each lead of the ECG had the following measurements recorded: baseline wander, QRS signal amplitude, and artifact amplitude. A lasso regression technique was used to create the model.

Results: The area under the curve for the model using all 36 elements is 1.0, indicating a perfect fit. A simplified model using 22 terms has an area under the curve of 0.994.

Conclusions: This study demonstrated that emergency physician opinion of ECG quality for the purpose of ruling out STEMI can be predicted through a regression model.