Can Laplacian Eigenmaps Be Used for Differentiation between Healthy Subjects and Patients with Corrected Tetralogy of Fallot?

Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF) is a congenital structural heart disease. While early diagnosis and corrective surgery allow most patients to live normal lives, some patients slowly deteriorate. The current inability to quantify the deterioration and predict these events prompts a data driven approach. Laplacian Eigenmaps (LEs) are a dimensionality reduction technique that can be used to project multi-lead ECGs onto a lower dimensional space. This pilot study aims to evaluate the ability of LEs to characterize deterioration of ToF patients. A general LE model is constructed, based on the 12-lead ECG recordings of 20 healthy controls. A set of distance metrics are developed to quantify the overall changes between different ECG recordings within this LE model. Statistically significant differences between control and ToF subjects were observed for most of the distance metrics. The analysis of changes over time in ToF patients indicates a general trend of increased distance over time in all the metrics, which can be related to a worsening condition. This indicates the relevance of LEs in multi-lead ECG processing, particularly for deterioration analysis.