Development of a conceptual reference model for digital ECG data storage

A conceptual reference model has been developed for storage and retrieval of electrocardiogram (ECG) data. The general principles of the model are outlined, and the external models for data acquisition and preprocessing are presented. The model has been designed around the concept of the entity-relationship data model, and includes as many as 38 different entities, 22 relationships with attributes, 16 one-to-many and 10 many-to-many relationships representing simple associations without attributes. Because of its complexity, the model has been split into 6 external models, each centered around a major processing task that an ECG database should be able to support. The complete conceptual reference model may then be built up by merging these 6 reference models