The effect of lossy ECG compression on QRS and HRV feature extraction

This paper describes the performance of beat detection and heart rate variability (HRV) feature extraction on electrocardiogram signals which have been compressed and reconstructed with a lossy compression algorithm. The set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) compression algorithm was used with sixteen compression ratios (CR) between 2 and 50 over the records of the MIT/BIH arrhythmia database. Sensitivities and specificities between 99% and 85% were computed for each CR utilised. The extracted HRV features were between 99% and 82% similar to the features extracted from the annotated records. A notable accuracy drop over all features extracted was noted beyond a CR of 30, with falls of 10% accuracy beyond this compression ratio.