ECG compression and labview implementation

Abstract

It is often very difficult for the patient to tell the difference between angina symptoms and heart attack symptoms, so it is very important to recognize the signs of heart attack and immedi-ately seek medical attention. A practical case of this type of remote consultation is examined in this paper. To deal with the huge amount of electrocardiogram (ECG) data for analysis, storage and transmission; an efficient ECG compression technique is needed to reduce the amount of data as much as possible while pre-serving the clinical significant signal for cardiac diagnosis. Here the ECG signal is analyzed for various parameters such as heart rate, QRS-width, etc. Then the various parameters and the compressed signal can be transmitted with less channel capacity. Comparison of various ECG compression techniques like TURNING POINT, AZTEC, CORTES, FFT and DCT it was found that DCT is the best suitable compression technique with compression ratio of about 100:1. In addition, different techniques are available for implementation of hardware components for signal pickup the virtual im-plementation with labview is also used for analysis of various cardiac parameters and to identify the abnormalities like Tachycardia, Bradycardia, AV Block, etc. Both hardware and virtual implementation are also detailed in this context.