Efficient compression technique based on temporal modelling of ECG signal using principle component analysis

This study presents an improved technique for compression of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, based on beat correlation of signal and principle component (PC) analysis, for ECG signal. For this purpose, two-dimensional matrix of ECG signal based on temporal inter-and intra-beat correlation is constructed, and further compression is achieved using PC extraction. Beat correlation helps to generate very few PCs that increase the compression efficiency. A detailed analysis has been presented for ten signals having different rhythms, wave morphologies and abnormalities of Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database. The effectiveness of the proposed method is examined with several attributes such as percentage root-mean-square difference, compression ratio, signal-to-noise ratio and correlation. Experimental results have shown that this method is very efficient for compression and suitable for different applications of telecardiology.