Title: An improved lossy and lossless combined ECG data compression using ASCII character encoding

Authors: Dharmendra Gurve; Barjinder S. Saini; Indu Saini

Addresses: Department of ECE, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar, GT Road, Amritsar Bypass Road, Jalandhar, Punjab 144011, India ' ECE Department, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar (NIT Jalandhar) GT Road, Amritsar Bypass Road, Jalandhar, Punjab 144011, India ' ECE Department, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar (NIT Jalandhar) GT Road, Amritsar Bypass Road, Jalandhar, Punjab 144011, India

Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) compression can significantly reduce the storage and transmission burden in telemedicine applications. In this paper, an improved ECG data compression method using ASCII character encoding is proposed. A QRS detection algorithm firstly applied to separate QRS and non-QRS region. Then, the QRS regions of ECG signal are compressed using lossless method and non-QRS regions are compressed using lossy method, which improves the compression ratio and minimise the reconstruction error between original and reconstructed ECG signal. All tested ECG records are selected from the PTB database. Statistical results show that the compression performance of the proposed method is better than both lossless and lossy ECG data compression technique. The average compression ratio (CR) and percent root mean square difference (PRD) obtained using proposed ECG data compression method are 27.40 and 4.753 respectively, which is better than other existing ECG data compression method.

Keywords: ECG compression; ASCII character encoding; telemedicine; lossy method; lossless method; electrocardiograms; data compression; QRS detection; ECG signals.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMEI.2016.079363

International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, 2016 Vol.8 No.4, pp.347 - 359

Received: 24 Sep 2015
Accepted: 27 Dec 2015
Published online: 27 Sep 2016 *

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