Simulation of monitoring strategies for atrial arrhythmia detection.

INTRODUCTION: The current external monitoring strategies used to detect atrial fibrillation (AF) and atrial tachycardia (AT) episodes are based either on transient periods of shortterm ECG recordings or on infrequent period of long-term continuous monitoring. The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of short-term daily ECG monitoring strategies for the detection of AF events.

METHODS AND MATERIALS: The investigation was based on simulations performed on data extracted from Burden II study (patients implanted with pacemaker for brady-tachy syndrome), reporting date, time and duration of each episodes.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We found that a short-term daily temporally-optimized ECG monitoring allows to detect a higher percentage of episodes than 1-day Holter monitoring and to be at least as effective as a 7-days monitoring.