Effective high compression of ECG signals at low level distortion

An effective method for compression of ECG signals, which falls within the transform lossy compression category, is proposed. The transformation is realized by a fast wavelet transform. The effectiveness of the approach, in relation to the simplicity and speed of its implementation, is a consequence of the efficient storage of the outputs of the algorithm which is realized in compressed Hierarchical Data Format. The compression performance is tested on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database producing compression results which largely improve upon recently reported benchmarks on the same database. For a distortion corresponding to a percentage root-mean-square difference (PRD) of 0.53, in mean value, the achieved average compression ratio is 23.17 with quality score of 43.93. For a mean value of PRD up to 1.71 the compression ratio increases up to 62.5. The compression of a 30 min record is realized in an average time of 0.14 s. The insignificant delay for the compression process, together with the high compression ratio achieved at low level distortion and the negligible time for the signal recovery, uphold the suitability of the technique for supporting distant clinical health care

Lossless compression schemes for ECG signals using neural network predictors

This paper presents lossless compression schemes for ECG signals based on neural network predictors and entropy encoders. Decorrelation is achieved by nonlinear prediction in the first stage and encoding of the residues is done by using lossless entropy encoders in the second stage. Different types of lossless encoders, such as Huffman, arithmetic, and runlength encoders, are used. The performances of the proposed neural network predictor-based compression schemes are evaluated using standard distortion and compression efficiency measures. Selected records from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database are used for performance evaluation. The proposed compression schemes are compared with linear predictor-based compression schemes and it is shown that about 11% improvement in compression efficiency can be achieved for neural network predictor-based schemes with the same quality and similar setup. They are also compared with other known ECG compression methods and the experimental results show that superior performances in terms of the distortion parameters of the reconstructed signals can be achieved with the proposed schemes. Copyright (c) 2007 R. Kannan and C. Eswaran