Time-Based Compression and Classification of Heartbeats

Heart function measured by electrocardiograms (ECG) is crucial for patient care. ECG generated waveforms are used to find patterns of irregularities in cardiac cycles in patients. In many cases, irregularities evolve over an extended period of time that requires continuous monitoring. However, this requires wireless ECG recording devices. These devices consist of an enclosed system that includes electrodes, processing circuitry, and a wireless communication block imposing constraints on area, power, bandwidth, and resolution. In order to provide continuous monitoring of cardiac functions for real-time diagnostics, we propose a methodology that combines compression and analysis of heartbeats. The signal encoding scheme is the time-based integrate and fire sampler. The diagnostics can be performed directly on the samples avoiding reconstruction required by the competing finite rate of innovation and compressed sensing. As an added benefit, our scheme provides an efficient hardware implementation and a compressed representation for the ECG recordings, while still preserving discriminative features. We demonstrate the performance of our approach through a heartbeat classification application consisting of normal and irregular heartbeats known as arrhythmia. Our approach that uses simple features extracted from ECG signals is comparable to results in the published literature.