easyG-electrocardiogram analysis system Graz

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most frequent heart arrhythmia and-moreover-one of the most important risk factors for the occurrence of stroke. In clinical diagnoses paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (PAF) often remains unrecognised if the arrhythmia is not manifest in the recorded electrocardiogram (ECG). This paper describes the implementation of a telemedical ECG processing system called "easyG-electrocardiogram analysis system Graz". The system is based on a previously reported automatic ECG processing algorithm to identify patients prone to PAF. For the current telemedical application this algorithm has been adapted in order to enable the central analysis of a conventional, routinely recorded long-term ECG. Cardiologists use this Internet-based application to transmit ECG signals to the analysis center, where they are processed automatically. A PAF-risk sensitive parameter is calculated and a report is generated, which is presented to the cardiologist within the web-application. Real clinical long-term ECGs and signals from a publicly available ECG database were used to test the system. One complete cycle including data compression, transmission, analysis and report generation took about 20 minutes.