A DPCM based Electrocardiogram coder with thresholding for real time telemonitoring applications

This paper illustrates a DPCM based approach for real-time compression of ECG data for real time telemonitoring application. For real time implementation a `frame' is considered with one original sample followed by 64 first difference elements. The coder compresses the non-QRS regions of an ECG data stream through stages of first difference, joint sign and magnitude coding, and run length encoding. A hard thresholding at the equipotential regions have been applied to enhance the RLE efficiency. For testing 10 second ECG data from Physionet has been used with 10-bit quantization level. The CR, PRD and PRDN achieved with PTB Database (ptbdb) are 6.42, 9.77 and 9.77 respectively. With MIT-BIH arrhythmia data (mitdb), these values are 5.92, 8.19 and 8.19 respectively. With MIT-BIH ECG Compression test data (cdb), these values are 4.25, 5.37 and 6.65 respectively. The frame wise compression rises to a value of 12-14 in flat (TP) segments and low 1-2 in QRS regions. The computational simplicity of the algorithm provides an opportunity to implement the coder using a low cost microcontroller.

[1]  Robert S. H. Istepanian,et al.  Resilient Ecg Wavelet Coding for Wireless Real-Time Telecardiology Applications , 2006 .

[2]  M.L. Hilton,et al.  Wavelet and wavelet packet compression of electrocardiograms , 1997, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[3]  H A Fozzard,et al.  AZTEC, a preprocessing program for real-time ECG rhythm analysis. , 1968, IEEE transactions on bio-medical engineering.

[4]  Jack Sklansky,et al.  Fast polygonal approximation of digitized curves , 1980, Pattern Recognit..

[5]  G E Dower,et al.  An ECG Compression Code. , 1973, Journal of electrocardiology.

[6]  A. Cohen,et al.  ECG compression using long-term prediction , 1993, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[7]  Madhuchhanda Mitra,et al.  ECG Acquisition and Automated Remote Processing , 2013 .

[8]  Szi-Wen Chen,et al.  Wavelet-based ECG compression by bit-field preserving and running length encoding , 2008, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[9]  W. Mueller.  Arrhythmia detection program for an ambulatory ECG monitor. , 1978, Biomedical sciences instrumentation.

[10]  W. A. Coberly,et al.  ECG data compression techniques-a unified approach , 1990, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[11]  Vinod Kumar,et al.  Direct Data Compression Techniques for Ecg Signals: Effect of Sampling Frequency on Performance , 1997, Int. J. Syst. Sci..

[12]  Mueller Wc,et al.  Arrhythmia detection program for an ambulatory ECG monitor. , 1978 .

[13]  M.E. Womble,et al.  Data compression for storing and transmitting ECG's/VCG's , 1977, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[14]  I. S. N. Murthy,et al.  ECG Data Compression Using Fourier Descriptors , 1986, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[15]  Hidekl Imai,et al.  An efficient encoding method for electrocardiography using spline functions , 1985, Systems and Computers in Japan.

[16]  Willis J. Tompkins,et al.  A New Data-Reduction Algorithm for Real-Time ECG Analysis , 1982, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[17]  M. Sabarimalai Manikandan,et al.  Wavelet threshold based TDL and TDR algorithms for real-time ECG signal compression , 2008, Biomed. Signal Process. Control..

[18]  Álvaro Alesanco Iglesias,et al.  Enhanced real-time ECG coder for packetized telecardiology applications , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[19]  W. S. Kuklinski,et al.  Fast Walsh transform data-compression algorithm: E.c.g. applications , 1983, Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing.