Compression of an ECG signal using mixed transforms

Abstract EN

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an important physiological signal for cardiac disease diagnosis.

With the increasing use of modern electrocardiogram monitoring devices that generate vast amount of data requiring huge storage capacity.

In order to decrease storage costs or make ECG signals suitable and ready for transmission through common communication channels, the ECG data volume must be reduced.

So an effective data compression method is required.

This paper presents an efficient technique for the compression of ECG signals.

In this technique, different transforms have been used to compress the ECG signals.

At first, a 1-D ECG data was segmented and aligned to a 2-D data array, then 2-D mixed transform was implemented to compress the ECG data in the 2-D form.

The compression algorithms were implemented and tested using multiwavelet, wavelet and slantlet transforms to form the proposed method based on mixed transforms.

Then vector quantization technique was employed to extract the mixed transform coefficients.

Some selected records from MIT/BIH arrhythmia database were tested contrastively and the performance of the proposed methods was analyzed and evaluated using MATLAB package.

Simulation results showed that the proposed methods gave a high compression ratio (CR) for the ECG signals comparing with other available methods.

For example, the compression of one record (record 100) yielded CR of 24.4 associated with percent root mean square difference (PRD) of 2.56% was achieved.