Study of the correlation dimension of ECG signals based on MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Data Base ECGs

The correlation dimensions of random noise and electrocardiograms of both normal and sick subjects have been analyzed and compared. The noisy signal has been obtained by using the random function of a DEC VAX computer; ECG data have been obtained from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Data Base. It was expected that a lower dimensionality of the ECG signal would be obtained with respect to the noisy one. This hypothesis has been confirmed by the analysis. An attempt was made to evaluate differences in the dimensionality of sick and normal subjects. The complexity and time-consuming aspects of the computations made it possible to examine only four patients. Up to now, there has not been enough evidence of significant differences between sick and normal subjects, and thus it is necessary to increase the number of analyzed cases. In order to obtain a good saturation of the correlation dimension, the embedding space has been spanned from 2 to 50