Parametric technique for P wave delineation

The electrocardiogram (ECG), which represents the electrical activity of the heart, is widely used for the diagnosis of cardiac diseases. The ECG typically consists of three important component waves, called the P, QRS, and T waves, which provide clinical information about the functioning of the heart. An important problem in ECG signal processing is that of delineation of the ECG component waves. The delineation of the P wave is difficult in certain cardiac diseases where the P wave overlaps the other ECG component waves. We present an innovative algorithm, for the delineation of the P waves, which works well even in such cases. The algorithm basically consists of pole-zero modeling of the discrete cosine transformed ECG. The resulting pole-zero filter is then decomposed into a set of unique partial fractions (PF), with each PF representing a sub-component or a fractional component (FC) of the ECG. A pole angle template matching procedure is used to identify the PFs of the QRS and T waves, and then their corresponding FCs are subtracted from the ECG to leave the P wave as the residue