This educational application is intended for physicians, medical students, and paramedics with ECG certification, not for lay people. The app wants to familiarise you with the athlete’s ECG. The ECG plays an increasingly (albeit still debated) role in the preparticipation eligibility screening of athletes.
Real athlete ECGs will be shown for your evaluation. You can give the ECG a green card if it shows changes that are expected in a sports heart and that do not suggest underlying heart disease. Or you can give it a red card when the ECG abnormality may be the expression of an underlying cardiovascular condition that may pose a risk during exercise and thus requires further evaluation.
This app is based on the “Seattle criteria” that were developed by a group of European and American experts for the purpose of evaluating ECGs in a screening setting.
The app starts to serve you 2 instruction sets with typical normal and abnormal ECGs as you might see during sportmedical evaluation of athletes. After each of your decisions, you will be shown the correct interpretation in association with a short explanatory note. The next set(s) serve mainly to test your ECG evaluation in a real life scenario, since they contain only a small proportion of ‘red card’ ECGs. Throughout the use of the app, you can pull down a concise summary of the Seattle criteria for help with your interpretation.
Disclaimer:
This app is based on the published and peer-reviewed Seattle criteria (Drezner at al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2013). The most important elements of the documents are summarised. The app does not replace the much more elaborate and nuanced description of the criteria in the published texts. The authors of this app do not claim completeness nor absolute accuracy. The app is only intended for use by physicians, medical students, or paramedical practitioners licensed for ECG interpretation. This app does not replace any official ECG qualification or certification, which is dependent on national jurisdiction. Each certified ECG reader remains responsible for his/her ECG interpretation and the clinical judgment that is based on it. By using this app, the user acknowledges that he/she will never try to transfer liability to the authors of this app for any injury and/or damage to persons or propterty arising from own clinical decisions in real patients.