Abstract:

Detecting peaks and boundaries of ECG characteristic waves supplies fundamental features for extracting clinically useful information. In this paper, an accurate threshold-independent multi-lead ECG delineation system is presented. Detection of QRS complexes, P and T waves is based on wavelet transform using Haar function as prototype wavelet and analyzing the first scale details coefficients.The delineator is performed on certain selected channels. Afterwards, a method, using a special histogram-based estimation, yields the exact positions of the significant points in all multi-channel ECG signals. The algorithm is applied on MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database signals and on multi-channel ECG signals measured at our institute.The single-channel delineation method was tested on MIT-BIH Arrythmia database signals. Sensitivity and positive predictivity were greater than 99.84% and 99.89% respetively for more than 15,990 beats. Furthermore, an overall mean error of less than two sampling intervals (1 ms) is obtained comparing the manual and the automatic method, whereas the standard deviation does not exceed three sampling intervals.