Abstract:
Fast, portable and accurate electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis systems play
a major role in the diagnosis of the cardiovascular diseases that causes a
vast number of deaths each year. Even though the application of the wavelet
transformation based techniques in ECG analysis systems provides very
accurate QRS wave complex detection results (associated with the
ventricular depolarization), they are often computationally demanding.
Further they are generally too complicated to be directly implemented in
portable microcontroller based battery powered systems and usually require
the power of a modern computer. Thus, in this paper a new and
computationally efficient wave transformation technique for discovering
the QRS complexes in ECG records by obtaining the wave’s first derivative
and then transforming the signal using a single impulse response function
(IRF) based R peak pulse (in the QRS complex) detection method is
proposed and established. By using this technique, a high degree of
accuracy is rapidly achieved to locate the R peaks by clearly distinguishing
them from large wave distortions in the ECG signal. The analysis of the
new technique was implemented using ECG records from the MIT-BIH
Arrhythmia database, and then compared with a wavelet transformation
based very accurate and recognized detection technique. Based on the
computational time consumption comparisons the proposed method is at
least faster by 350%. Further the calculated standard QRS detector
performance parameters such as the sensitivity (Se) and the true prediction
(+P) are comparable with the recognized method. For every ECG instance
an identification error rate of less than 1% was attained. We believe that
there is room for further improvements and the technique can be used in
portable ECG analysis systems with a higher computational performance.