Two solutions for the processing of ambulatory electrocardiogram

Abstract

The Electrocardiogram (ECG) ambulatory monitoring has three stages: acquisition, processing and analysis, in each one, the information on ECG signal itself or the time series extracted from it are affected by noises, interferences and artifacts. The analysis of the duration and variability of heart intervals establishes rules for the selection of valid beats and to determine with accuracy the fiducially points, especially the T wave end. This paper describes two problems and their solutions involved in the processing stage. First, a method is described to identify the valid beats for heart rate variability analysis, and then another one is presented for the determination of T wave end point, based on the calculation of trapezes areas. The validation of both methods exhibits excellent performance indexes in comparison with other approaches.