Empirical determination of an ECG compression ratio for mobile telecardiology applications

Abstract

It is important to consider electrocardiogram (ECG) data compression that does not sacrifice diagnostic quality significantly before applying ECG data compression to mobile telecardiology applications. In this paper, we assessed the reconstructed ECG quality after compression with a wavelet-based low-delay algorithm, using both subjective and objective indices. We included diverse ECG databases including both normal and abnormal ECG data, and evaluated the relationship between the subjective and objective indices, paying close attention to specific cases in which there was a large discrepancy between the objective and subjective quality. Based on our observations, an empirically determined compression ratio can be applied to compress continuous ECG signals in limited-bandwidth mobile telecardiology applications.