An improved lossy and lossless combined ECG data compression using ASCII character encoding

Abstract

Electrocardiogram (ECG) compression can significantly reduce the storage and transmission burden in telemedicine applications. In this paper, an improved ECG data compression method using ASCII character encoding is proposed. A QRS detection algorithm firstly applied to separate QRS and non-QRS region. Then, the QRS regions of ECG signal are compressed using lossless method and non-QRS regions are compressed using lossy method, which improves the compression ratio and minimise the reconstruction error between original and reconstructed ECG signal. All tested ECG records are selected from the PTB database. Statistical results show that the compression performance of the proposed method is better than both lossless and lossy ECG data compression technique. The average compression ratio (CR) and percent root mean square difference (PRD) obtained using proposed ECG data compression method are 27.40 and 4.753 respectively, which is better than other existing ECG data compression method.