Artificial Neural Network based electrocardiogram pattern recognition

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the P, QRS, T wave indicating the electrical activity of the heart. Electrocardiogram is the most easily accessible bioelectric signal that provides the doctors with reasonably accurate data regarding the patient heart condition. Many of the cardiac problems are visible as distortions in the electrocardiogram (ECG). Normally ECG related diagnoses are carried out manually. As the abnormal heart beats can occur randomly it becomes very tedious and time-consuming to analyze say a 24 hour ECG signal, as it may contain hundreds of thousands of heart beats. In this work we propose computer based automated system to help the doctor to detect cardiac arrhythmia. As reference, we have used the Normal, Fusion and Premature Ventricular Contraction (PVC) signals of the MIT-BIH Database. Then we have focused on the various schemes for extracting the useful features of the ECG signals for use with artificial neural networks. We extract the principal characteristics of the signal by means of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique and other techniques such as Discrete Cosine Transform and Discrete Wavelet Transform. After signal pre-processing, they are applied to an Artificial Neural Network Multilayer Perceptron (ANN MLP). The task of an ANN based system is to correctly identify the three classes the feature extraction schemes are discussed and compared with RBF and SOFM networks in this work.