Management of electrocardiographic tracings in a clinical departmental database

The authors describe a computerized system dedicated to the management of electrocardiographic tracings (ECGs) in a clinical cardiological database, working on a local area network (LAN). Clinical data are recorded during diagnostic procedures, and transfered into a database, built with an Xbase language and working on a LAN system. Management and representation of electrocardiographic tracings is allowed by dedicated procedures developed with the Pascal language. The use of the system consists of the following steps: storage of tracings by an electrocardiographic recorder; transmission of the signal to a network station; compression of the tracing; creation of a stable relationship between tracings and clinical data; and finally the retrieval procedure. The quality of representation is satisfying even on a screen equipped with a VGA board. Memory use is reduced to a few kbytes/ECG, due to a dedicated compression algorithm. Retrieval of the tracings needs less than one second, even on a personal computer with an 80286 CPU. Printing is available by all the clients of the network. Management of ECG and alphanumeric data on the network environment greatly enhances the efficiency of the clinical cardiological database. Satisfactory performance can be obtained even on "low profile DOS machines".<>