Analysis ECG Data Compression Techniques - A Survey Approach

Electrocardiogram (ECG) plays a significant role in diagnosing most of the cardiac diseases. One cardiac cycle in an ECG signal consists of the P-QRS-T waves. Many types of ECG recordings generate a vast amount of data. ECG compression becomes mandatory to efficiently store and retrieve this data from medical database. Recently, numerous research and techniques have been developed for compression of the signal. These techniques are essential to a variety of application ranging from diagnostic to ambulatory ECG’s. Thus, the need for effective ECG compression techniques is of great importance. Many existing compression algorithms have shown some success in electrocardiogram compression; however, algorithms that produce better compression ratios and less loss of data in the reconstructed signal are needed. This proposed paper discusses various techniques proposed earlier in literature for compression of an ECG signal and provide comparative study of these techniques. In addition this paper also suggested a new coding framework for the compression of ECG signal based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). Keywords— Compression Ratio (CR), ECG, Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), Percentage Mean Square Difference (PRD), Signal Compression.