In this article a method for the detection of broken rotor bars in asynchronous machines operating under full load is presented. Unlike most Motor Current Signature Analysis (MCSA) approaches, which operate in the frequency domain, our method operates in the time domain. The scheme is based on the use of a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) fault/anomaly detector applied on the three stator currents to calculate the Q statistic which is employed for detecting a fault. The efficiency of the proposed scheme was experimentally evaluated using different fault severity levels, ranging from 1/4 of a broken bar to three broken bars. The obtained results indicate that the method can detect the caused asymmetry with a very restricted amount of data.