R-Peak Detection using Daubechies Wavelet and ECG Signal Classification using Radial Basis Function Neural Network

Abstract

This paper employed the Daubechies wavelet transform (WT) for R-peak detection and radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) to classify the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Five types of ECG beats: normal beat, paced beat, left bundle branch block (LBBB) beat, right bundle branch block (RBBB) beat and premature ventricular contraction (PVC) were classified. 500 QRS complexes were arbitrarily extracted from 26 records in Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database, which are available on Physionet website. Each and every QRS complex was represented by 21 points from p1 to p21 and these QRS complexes of each record were categorized according to types of beats. The system performance was computed using four types of parameter evaluation metrics: sensitivity, positive predictivity, specificity and classification error rate. The experimental result shows that the average values of sensitivity, positive predictivity, specificity and classification error rate are 99.8%, 99.60%, 99.90% and 0.12%, respectively with RBFNN classifier. The overall accuracy achieved for back propagation neural network (BPNN), multilayered perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM) and RBFNN classifiers are 97.2%, 98.8%, 99% and 99.6%, respectively. The accuracy levels and processing time of RBFNN is higher than or comparable with BPNN, MLP and SVM classifiers.