Classification of cardiac arrhythmias using biorthogonal wavelet preprocessing and SVM

In the current study we present a technique for the detection and classification of cardiac arrhythmias using biorthogonal wavelet functions and support vector machines (SVM). First, the wavelet transforms is applied to decompose the ECG signal into wavelet scales. Further, a soft thresholding technique is used to denoise and detect important cardiac events in the signal. Subsequently, we applied SVM classifier to discriminate the detected events into normal or pathological ones in the signal. Numeric computations demonstrate that the efficient wavelet pre-processing provides an accurate estimation of important physiological features of ECG and moreover it improves the SVM classification performance.