Compression of ECG Signal Based on Compressive Sensing and the Extraction of Significant Features

Abstract

Diagnoses of heart diseases can be done effectively on long term recordings of ECG signals that preserve the signals’ morphologies. In these cases, the volume of the ECG data produced by the monitoring systems grows significantly. To make the mobile healthcare possible, the need for efficient ECG signal compression algorithms to store and/or transmit the signal efficiently has been rising exponentially. Currently, ECG signal is acquired at Nyquist rate or higher, thus introducing redundancies between adjacent heartbeats due to its quasi-periodic structure. Existing compression methods remove these redundancies by achieving compression and facilitate transmission of the patient’s imperative information. Based on the fact that these signals can be approximated by a linear combination of a few coefficients taken from different basis, an alternative new compression scheme based on Compressive Sensing (CS) has been proposed. CS provides a new approach concerned with signal compression and recovery by exploiting the fact that ECG signal can be reconstructed by acquiring a relatively small number of samples in the “sparse” domains through well-developed optimization procedures. In this paper, a single-lead ECG compression method has been proposed based on improving the signal sparisty through the extraction of the signal significant features. The proposed method starts with a preprocessing stage that detects the peaks and periods of the Q, R and S waves of each beat. Then, the QRS-complex for each signal beat is estimated. The estimated QRS-complexes are subtracted from the original ECG signal and the resulting error signal is compressed using the CS technique. Throughout this process, DWT sparsifying dictionaries have been adopted. The performance of the proposed algorithm, in terms of the reconstructed signal quality and compression ratio, is evaluated by adopting DWT spatial domain basis applied to ECG records extracted from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The results indicate that average compression ratio of 11:1 with PRD1 = 1.2% are obtained. Moreover, the quality of the retrieved signal is guaranteed and the compression ratio achieved is an improvement over those obtained by previously reported algorithms. Simulation results suggest that CS should be considered as an acceptable methodology for ECG compression.