Papercut: The DEFI 2022 Study

 There is a significant difference in Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) survival, in the order of 10 to 20 times, between non-shockable(2% survival) and shockable rhythms(25-50% survival) (1).

Ventricular fibrillation is the most common shockable rhythm in OHCA. We know that minimising time to defibrillation increases the chances of ROSC and survival, however the inherent 2 minute cycles built into resuscitation algorithms delay defibrillation. The detection of shockable rhythms, using artifact-filtering for ECG analysis, whilst CPR is being performed, can decrease the time to arrhythmia recognition and defibrillation.

We look at the DEFI 2022 study(2) which aimed to assess the ability of this technology to analyse cardiac rhythms during cardiac compressions. They compared the cardiac compression fraction in patients using this technology, to those using conventional defibrillation algorithms.

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