Development of QRS detection algorithm designed for wearable cardiorespiratory system

An in-home sleep monitoring system was developed previously in our laboratory for monitoring electrocardiography (ECG) and respiratory signals. However, the ECG signal acquired with this system is prone to high-grade noise caused by motion artifact. Since the detection of the QRS complexes with high accuracy is very important in a computer-based analysis of the ECG, a high accuracy QRS detection algorithm is developed and based on the combination of heart rate indicators and morphological ECG features. The proposed algorithm is tested both on 16 h data acquired using the two sensors of our cardiorespiratory belt system, i.e., the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) film and the conductive fabric sheets, and on all 48 records of the MIT/BIH Arrhythmia Database. Satisfying results are obtained for both databases, the sensitivity S(e) and positive predictivity P(+) were calculated for each case and results show S(e)=[96.98%, 93.76%] and P(+)=[97.81%, 99.48%] for conductive fabric and PVDF film sensors, respectively, and S(e)=99.77% and P(+)=99.64% in the case of the MIT/BIH Arrhythmia Database. Further, heart rate variability (HRV) measures were calculated using our system and a commercial system. A comparison between systems' results is done to show the usefulness of our developed algorithm used with our cardiorespiratory belt sensor.     

QRS detection based on wavelet coefficients

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal processing and analysis provide crucial information about functional status of the heart. The QRS complex represents the most important component within the ECG signal. Its detection is the first step of all kinds of automatic feature extraction. QRS detector must be able to detect a large number of different QRS morphologies. This paper examines the use of wavelet detail coefficients for the accurate detection of different QRS morphologies in ECG. Our method is based on the power spectrum of QRS complexes in different energy levels since it differs from normal beats to abnormal ones. This property is used to discriminate between true beats (normal and abnormal) and false beats. Significant performance enhancement is observed when the proposed approach is tested with the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database (MITDB). The obtained results show a sensitivity of 99.64% and a positive predictivity of 99.82%.     

A new mathematical based QRS detector using continuous wavelet transform

In this paper, a new viewpoint in ECG detection is presented using continuous wavelet transform (CWT). In order to magnify QRS complex and reduce the effects of other peaks, the concept of dominant rescaled wavelet coefficients (DRWC) is defined. Using this concept, the relations between the time duration of components of a QRS complex and their wavelet transforms are derived analytically. The proposed relations are used to define local search interval at the vicinity of each QRS complex components. Using DRWC concept, the proposed detection algorithm enables us to detect the R peaks even at the presence of long P and T peaks. Then, each detected complex is classified based on its morphology. The classification is carried out regarding possible QRS patterns and their wavelet transform. We evaluate the algorithm on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. The QRS detector has an average sensitivity of Se = 99.91% and a positive predictivity P⁺= 99.72% over the first lead of the database.     

High resolution ambulatory holter ECG events detection-delineation via modified multi-lead wavelet-based features analysis: Detection and quantification of heart rate turbulence

The presented study describes a false-alarm probability-FAP bounded solution for detecting and quantifying Heart Rate Turbulence (HRT) major parameters including heart rate (HR) acceleration/deceleration, turbulence jump, compensatory pause value and HR recovery rate. To this end, first, high resolution multi-lead holter electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is appropriately pre-processed via Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and then, a fixed sample size sliding window is moved on the pre-processed trend. In each slid, the area under the excerpted segment is multiplied by its curve-length to generate the Area Curve Length (ACL) metric to be used as the ECG events detection-delineation decision statistic (DS). The ECG events detection-delineation algorithm was applied to various existing databases and as a result, the average values of sensitivity and positive predictivity Se = 99.95% and P+ = 99.92% were obtained for the detection of QRS complexes, with the average maximum delineation error of 7.4 msec, 4.2 msec and 8.3 msec for P-wave, QRS complex and T-wave, respectively. Because the heart-rate time series might include fast fluctuations which don’t follow a premature ventricular contraction (PVC) causing high-level false alarm probability (false positive detections) of HRT detection, based on the binary two-dimensional Neyman-Pearson radius test (which is a FAP-bounded classifier), a new method for discrimination of PVCs from other beats using the geometrical-based features is proposed. The statistical performance of the proposed HRT detection-quantification algorithm was obtained as Se = 99.94% and P+ = 99.85% showing marginal improvement for the detection-quantification of this phenomenon. In summary, marginal performance improvement of ECG events detection-delineation process, high performance PVC detection and isolation from noisy holter data and reliable robustness against holter strong noise and artifacts can be mentioned as important merits and capabilities of the proposed HRT detection algorithm.     

小波滤波与QRS波检测

利用双正交样条小波等效滤波器,实现了ECG信号的小波分解和重建。分析心电信号奇异点与其小波变换模极大值对的零交叉点的关系,提出了心电信号QRS波检测的算法。在检测算法中还使用了一系列策略来提高算法的抗干扰能力和QRS检测的准确性。经MIT/BIH心律失常数据库验证,QRS波的正确检测率达99.506%。最后将该算法应用到Windows Mobile智能手机上的心电监护系统中,达到令人满意的效果。     

QRS complexes detection for ECG signal: the Difference Operation Method

This paper proposes a simple and reliable method termed the Difference Operation Method (DOM) to detect the QRS complex of an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. The proposed DOM includes two stages. The first stage is to find the point R by applying the difference equation operation to an ECG signal. The second stage looks for the points Q and S based on the point R to find the QRS complex. From the QRS complex, the T wave and P wave can be obtained by the existing methods. Some records (QRS complex and T and P waves) of ECG signals in MIT-BIH arrhythmia database is tested to show the DOM has a much more precise detection rate and faster speed than other methods.     

QRS complex detection using Empirical Mode Decomposition

In this paper, we present a new Empirical Mode Decomposition based algorithm for the purpose of QRS complex detection. This algorithm requires the following stages: a high-pass filter, signal Empirical Mode Decomposition, a nonlinear transform, an integration and finally, a low-pass filter is used. In order to evaluate the proposed technique, the well known ECG MIT–BIH database has been used. Moreover it is compared to a reference technique, namely “Christov's” detection method. As it will be shown later, the proposed algorithm allows to achieve high detection performances, described by means both the sensitivity and the specificity parameters.     

基于形态小波的QRS波检测算法

根据心电信号中QRS波群的特点,提出了一种基于小波变换和数学形态学相结合的形态小波检测算法。小波变换方法对突变信号在时频域都具有优异的辨识能力及“可变焦距”的优良特性;数学形态学是基于信号局部特征的,能够在时域上提取信号的峰谷信息。将这两种方法结合起来,利用MIT/BIH心电数据库进行验证,QRS波群的检出率高达99.84%。     

Value locality based storage compression memory architecture for ECG sensor node

This paper proposes a value compression memory architecture for QRS detection in ultra-low-power ECG sensor nodes. Based on the exploration of value spatial locality in the most critical preprocessing stage of the ECG algorithm, a cost efficient compression strategy, which reorganizes several adjacent sample values into a base value with several displacements, is proposed. The displacements will be half or quarter scale quantifications; as a result, the storage size is reduced. The memory architecture saves memory space by storing compressed data with value spatial locality into a compressed memory section and by using a small, uncompressed memory section as backup to store the uncompressed data when a value spatial locality miss occurs. Furthermore,a low-power accession strategy is proposed to achieve low-power accession. An embodiment of the proposed memory architecture has been evaluated using the MIT/BIH database, the proposed memory architecture and a low-power accession strategy to achieve memory space savings of 32.5% and to achieve a 68.1% power reduction with a negligible performance reduction of 0.2%.     

基于非线性能量算子的心电信号R波检测方法

将Marr小波变换和非线性能量算子相结合实现了心电信号的R波检测,心电信号的Marr小波分解信号很好地抑制了各种噪声干扰,结合非线性能量算子运算可突出了QRS波的特征点,使得阈值检测便于实施,利用修正策略提高了R波检测率,经MIT/BIH标准心律失常数据库验证,R波的检测率可达到99.7%,该方法对于心电信号的自动分析系统具有应用价值。     

Effective and efficient detection of premature ventricular contractions based on variation of principal directions

Classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) data stream is essential to diagnosis of critical heart conditions. It is vital to accurately detect abnormality in the ECG in order to prevent possible beginning of life-threatening cardiac symptoms. In this paper, we focus on identifying premature ventricular contraction (PVC) which is one of the most common heart rhythm abnormalities. We use “Replacing” strategy to check the effects of each individual heartbeat on the variation of principal directions. Based on this idea, an online PVC detection method is proposed to classify the new arriving PVC beats in the real-time and online manner. The proposed approach is tested on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database (MIT-BIH-AR). The PVC detection accuracy was 98.77%, with the sensitivity and positive predictivity of 96.12% and 86.48%, respectively. These results are an improvement on previous reported results for PVC detection. In addition, our proposed method is effective in terms of computation time. The average execution time of our proposed method was 3.83 s for a 30 min ECG recording. It shows the capability of the classifier to detect abnormal PVCs in online manner.     

一种改进的心电图QRS波群检测算法

在利用小波变换检测QRS波群时,最关键的部分就是模极值配对,提出一种区域极值配对算法来检测R波。首先利用二次样条小波基函数和多孔(ATrous)算法对心电(ECG)信号进行小波变换求取模极值,用正极大值来确定搜索区域,以这个正极大值为起点,以这个确定区域为搜索范围,向左搜索负极大值点,将这两个极值配对,他们之间的过零点就是R波的对应点,然后在检测到R波的基础上检测出Q波与S波,再结合距离最大值法检测出QRS波群的起止点。并采用医学相关理论对检测结果进行优化,进一步去除错检点,补偿漏检点。最后利用MIT-BIH心率失常数据库中记录的数据对该算法进行验证,实验结果表明所提算法能准确检测QRS波群,平均检出率达到了99.97%。     

Identification of QRS complexes in 12-lead electrocardiogram

A method for the detection of QRS complexes in 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) using support vector machine (SVM) is presented in this paper. Digital filtering techniques are used to remove base line wander and power line interference. SVM is used for the identification of QRS complexes in the processed signal. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated against the standard CSE ECG database. The results indicated that the algorithm achieved 99.75% of the identification rate. The percentage of false positive and false negative is 1.61% and 0.26%, respectively. The performance of the proposed algorithm is found to be better than published results of the other QRS detectors tested on the same database. The proposed method functions reliably even under the conditions of poor signal quality in the ECG data.     

一种多导联QRS波实时检测算法

针对多导联心电监护仪对QRS波的分析需求,提出一种多导联QRS波实时检测算法。对原始心电图信号进行工频滤波和低通滤波处理,将各导联按照单导联预检波规则进行QRS波判别,通过决策融合多个导联的判别结果得到最终判别结果。在圣彼得堡INCART 12导联心率失常数据库上的验证结果表明,该算法的平均识别率和准确率分别为99.88%和99.73%。     

An improved procedure for detection of heart arrhythmias with novel pre‐processing techniques

The objective of this study is to develop an algorithm to detect and classify six types of electrocardiogram (ECG) signal beats including normal beats (N), atrial pre‐mature beats (A), right bundle branch block beats (R), left bundle branch block beats (L), paced beats (P), and pre‐mature ventricular contraction beats (PVC or V) using a neural network classifier. In order to prepare an appropriate input vector for the neural classifier several pre‐processing stages have been applied. Initially, a signal filtering method is used to remove the ECG signal baseline wandering. Continuous wavelet transform is then applied in order to extract features of the ECG signal. Next, principal component analysis is used to reduce the size of the data. A well‐known neural network architecture called the multi‐layered perceptron neural network is then utilized as the final classifier to classify each ECG beat as one of six groups of signals under study. Finally, the MIT‐BIH database is used to evaluate the proposed algorithm, resulting in 99.5% sensitivity, 99.66% positive predictive accuracy and 99.17% total accuracy.     

ECG signal classification and arrhythmia detection using ELM-RNN

Arrhythmia is a unique type of heart disease which produces inefficient and irregular heartbeat. This is a cardiac disease which is diagnosed through electrocardiogram (ECG) procedure. Several studies have been focused on the speed and accuracy on the learning algorithm by applying pattern recognition, artificial intelligence in the classification algorithm. In this work a novel classification algorithm is planned based on ELM (Extreme Learning Machine) with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) by using morphological filtering. The popular publicly available ECG arrhythmia database (MIT-BIH arrhythmia DB) is used to express the performance of the proposed algorithm where the level of accuracy is compared with the existing similar types of work. The comparative study shows that performance of our proposed model is much faster than the models working with RBFN (radial basis function network), BPBB(back propagation neural network) and Support Vector Machine. The experimental result with the MIT BIH database with hidden neurons of ELM with RNN, the accuracy is 96.41%, sensitivity 93.62% and specificity 92.66%. The classification methodology follows main four steps the heart beat detection, the ECG feature extraction, feature selection and the construction of the proposed classifier.

     

基于香农能量与自适应阈值的心电QRS复合波检测算法

针对现有心电QRS复合波检测算法对于一些信号异常的情况检测效果仍然不理想的问题,提出了一种基于香农能量与自适应阈值相结合的心电QRS复合波检测算法,以解决QRS复合波检测的低准确率问题。首先,从预处理后的信号提取香农能量包络;然后,结合改进的自适应阈值方法对QRS复合波进行检测;最后,根据QRS复合波增强后的信号定位所检测的QRS复合波的位置。使用MIT-BIH心律失常数据库的数据对所提算法进行性能评估,结果表明,所提算法即使在信号中存在高大的P波、T波、不规则心律以及严重的噪声干扰时依然能准确检测QRS复合波的位置,总体数据检测的敏感性、阳性检测度和准确率分别达到了99.88%、99.85%和99.73%,且该算法能够在保证准确率的情况下快速地完成QRS复合波的检测任务。     

Detection of electrocardiogram signals using an efficient method

Automatic detection of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is very important for clinical diagnosis of heart disease. This paper investigates the design of a three-step system for recognition of the five types of ECG beat. In the first step, stationary wavelet transform (SWT) is used for noise reduction of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Feature extraction module extracts higher order statistics of ECG signals in combination with three timing interval features. Then hybrid Bees algorithm-radial basis function (RBF_BA) technique is used to classify the five types of electrocardiogram (ECG) beat. The suggested method can accurately classify and discriminate normal (Normal) and abnormal heartbeats. Abnormal heartbeats include left bundle branch block (LBBB), right bundle branch block (RBBB), atrial premature contractions (APC) and premature ventricular contractions (PVC). Finally, the classification capability of five different classes of ECG signals is attained over eight files from the MIT/BIH arrhythmia database. Simulation results show that classification accuracy of 95.79% for the first dataset (4000 beats) and an overall accuracy of detection of 95.18% are achieved over eight files from the MIT/BIH arrhythmia database.     

A fast expert system for electrocardiogram arrhythmia detection

Abstract: A fast expert system for electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmia detection has been designed in this study. Selecting proper wavelet details, the ECG signals are denoised and beat locations are detected. Beat locations are later used to locate the peaks of the individual waves present in each cardiac cycle. Onsets and offsets of the P and T waves are also detected. These are considered as ECG features which are later used for arrhythmia detection utilizing a novel fuzzy classifier. Fourteen types of arrhythmias and abnormalities can be detected implementing the proposed procedure. We have evaluated the algorithm on the MIT–BIH arrhythmia database. Application of the wavelet filter with the scaling function which closely resembles the shape of the ECG signal has been shown to provide precise results in this study.     

A real-time QRS detection method based on moving-averaging incorporating with wavelet denoising

In this paper, a simple moving average-based computing method for real-time QRS detection is proposed. In addition, for signal preprocessing our detection algorithm also incorporates a wavelet-based denoising procedure to effectively reduce the noise level for electrocardiogram (ECG) data. The overall computational structure of the proposed algorithm allows the QRS detection to be performed and implemented in real-time with high time- and memory-efficiency. Algorithm performance was evaluated against the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The numerical results indicated that the novel algorithm finally achieved about 99.5% of the detection rate for the standard database, and also, it could function reliably even under the condition of poor signal quality in the measured ECG data.