A high performance compression algorithm for ECG with irregular periods

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals have both intra- and inter-beat correlations, which can be exploited for compression by arranging the ECG signals into appropriate two-dimensional (2-D) representations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that maps 1-D ECG signals to 2-D arrays effectively and then compresses the 2-D arrays with efficient image compression algorithms. Compared to existing 2-D ECG compression methods, the proposed algorithm is unique in that it reveals much more intra- and inter-beat correlation characteristic of ECG signals. Therefore, the image compression algorithms can achieve enhanced performance. Furthermore, unlike existing 2-D ECG compression methods, the proposed algorithm works well for both regular and irregular ECG signals with extremely varying periods. In particular, its performance is insensitive to QRS miss detection cases.