Robust identification of heartbeats with blood pressure signals and noise detection

Accuracy in detection of electrocardiographic (ECG) heart beats can be vastly improved with the aid of blood pressure (BP) monitoring. Cross validation between ECG and BP signals is used to identify the part of signals not contaminated by large, high frequency noises, where we can extract accurately the delay between the QRS peaks and BP peaks (defined in the “Methods” section). The delay is used to identify the QRS peaks even when the signal is very noisy. We also present a simple noise detection algorithm for the ECG signals. This complementary algorithm leads to high success rate in identifying aberrant ECG beats including the supraventricular premature beats (SVPB), premature ventricular contraction (PVC) and other unclassifiable beats.