doi:10.1109/TBME.2019.2923587engKontaxis, SpyridonLázaro Plaza, JesúsCorino, ValentinaSandberg, FridaBailón Luesma, RaquelLaguna Lasaosa, PabloSörnmo, LeifECG-derived respiratory rate in atrial fibrillationART-2019-112046Objective: The present study addresses the problem of estimating the respiratory rate from the morphological ECG variations in the presence of atrial fibrillatory waves (f-waves). The significance of performing f-wave suppression before respiratory rate estimation is investigated. Methods: The performance of a novel approach to ECG-derived respiration, named “slope range” (SR) and designed particularly for operation in atrial fibrillation (AF), is compared to that of two well-known methods based on either R-wave angle (RA) or QRS loop rotation angle (LA). A novel rule is proposed for spectral peak selection in respiratory rate estimation. The suppression of f-waves is accomplished using signal- and noise-dependent QRS weighted averaging. The performance evaluation embraces real as well as simulated ECG signals acquired from patients with persistent AF; the estimation error of the respiratory rate is determined for both types of signals. Results: Using real ECG signals and reference respiratory signals, rate estimation without f-wave suppression resulted in a median error of 0.015±0.021 Hz and 0.019±0.025 Hz for SR and RA, respectively, whereas LA with f-wave suppression resulted in 0.034±0.039 Hz. Using simulated signals, the results also demonstrate that f-wave suppression is superfluous for SR and RA, whereas it is essential for LA. Conclusion: The results show that SR offers the best performance as well as computational simplicity since f-wave suppression is not needed. Significance: The respiratory rate can be robustly estimated from the ECG in the presence of AF.2019http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/8650010.1109/TBME.2019.2923587http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/86500oai:zaguan.unizar.es:86500info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA-FEDER/T39-17R-BSICoSinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/745755/EU/Wearable Cardiorespiratory Monitor/WECARMONThis project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No H2020 745755-WECARMONinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MINECO-FEDER/RTI2018-097723-B-I00IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 67, 3 (2019), 905-914byhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess