Detection of an electrocardiogram R wave based on the multiscale products : MIT/BIH arrhythmia and Qt databases evaluation

This paper introduces a new method for R waves locations using the multiscale wavelet analysis. That is based on Mallatpsilas and Hwangpsilas approach for singularity detection via local maxima of the wavelet coefficients signals. Using a first derivative Gaussian function as prototype wavelet, we apply the point-wise product of the wavelet coefficients (PWC) over some successive scales, in order to enhance the peak amplitude of the modulus maxima line and to reduce noise. The R wave corresponds to two modulus maximum lines with opposite signs (min-max) of multiscale product. The proposed algorithm does not include regularity analysis, but only amplitude based criteria. We evaluated the algorithm on two manually annotated databases, such as MIT-BIH arrhythmia and QT. By using this method, the detection rate of R wave is above 99.91% for the MIT-BIH and 99.97% for QT database.