An Efficent Lossless Compression Scheme for ECG Signal

Cardiac diseases constitute the main cause of mortality around the globe. For detection and identification of cardiac problems, it is very important to monitor the patient's heart activities for long periods during his normal daily life. The recorded signal that contains information about the condition of the heart called electrocardiogram (ECG). As a result, long recording of ECG signal amounts to huge data sizes. In this work, a robust lossless ECG data compression scheme for realtime applications is proposed. The developed algorithm has the advantages of lossy compression without introducing any distortion to the reconstructed signal. The ECG signals under test were taken from the PTB Diagnostic ECG Database. The compression procedure is simple and provides a high compression ratio compared to other lossless ECG compression methods. The compressed ECG data is generated as a text file. The decompression scheme has also been developed using the reverse logic and it is observed that there is no difference between original and reconstructed ECG signal. Keywords—ECG; lossless compression; data encoding; compression ratio