Twelve-Dimensional Vectorcardiography - Is More Better?

Vectorcardiography (VCG) is generated by projecting signals from several leads onto three main orthogonal axes. There is evidence that by doing this projection, some relevant diagnostic information may be lost.We investigated a new way to reduce this information loss. For that, we computed VCG features from the standard 12-lead ECG system and compared its performance in diagnosing myocardial infarction with the standard Frank's VCG, a VCG derived from the 12-lead ECG using the Dower 's inverse transform and with a 3-dimensional projection of the 12-lead ECG obtained with principal component analysis. Although the results are not conclusive, they suggest that the proposed 12-dimensional VCG may reduce the information loss by preserving all the ECG leads without the need of any projection.