Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
ECG Compression
5.1 Introduction
Compression techniques for biomedical data have been an active area of research
for the last 50 years or more. There are two principal areas of application of
biosignal compression, viz. (a) efficient recording and processing of long duration
patient data (typically ECG, PPG, etc.) for off-line evaluation and (b) real-time or
off-line transmission of biomedical signals for remote-end diagnosis by experts.
Among these two, the second one has been extensively used in diversified areas
like healthcare systems, military applications, sports physiology, space research,
and many more. Remote ECG monitoring of patients has been a prime area of
telehealthcare, and data compression plays a significant role in efficient utilization
of the communication channel. Telecardiology, a special form of tele-ECG,
involves collection of patient's ECG data, its compression, and transmission (real
time or off-line) for remote-end acquisition and analysis by cardiac experts. In
medical data compression, an important criterion is to preserve the pathological
information in the compressed data so that the decompressed data are clinically
acceptable to the expert for diagnostic interpretation. Over the years, researchers
have prescribed some statistical parameters or measures, which provide an esti-
mation of the reconstruction quality of the compression-decompression algo-
rithms. In this chapter, some useful ECG compression techniques in practice are
reviewed. A new technique, which is an adaptation of delta modulation scheme, is
described for single-lead ECG compression. An application of the scheme for
compression of ECG data and its transmission in a GSM-based communication
system is also described.
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