A novel approach for delineation and feature extraction in QRS complex of ECG signal

This paper reports the development of a software suite to be accessed in future with any General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) enabled mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) for the extraction and analysis of disease-related features from the images of paper based ECG records. In India and other developing countries, the cheaper paper based ECG machines are mainly used. Also in rural areas of these countries - where there is acute dearth of qualified cardiologists, the cardiac diseases are still the major silent killers. One way of addressing this problem is cellular medicine which necessitates an intelligent cardiac parameter extraction algorithm. In our bid to address exactly this requirement, a software is developed with the help of few image processing techniques. At first, the background noises i.e. the gridlines are removed by thresholding technique. Binarization and thinning has been done for extraction of digital time data and then Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and water reservoir based pattern recognition technique are subsequently used to delineate other important ECG parameters for ECG interpretation.