Iranian Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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The aim of this study is to address a new feature extraction method in the area of the heart arrhythmia classification based on a metric with simple mathematical calculation called Curve-Length Method (CLM). In the presented method, curve length of the under study excerpted segment of signal is considered as an informative feature in which the effect of important geometric parameters of the original signal can be found. To show merits of the presented method, first the original electrocardiogram (ECG) in lead I is pre-processed by removing its baseline wander then by scaling it in the [-1,1] interval. In the next step, using a trous method, discrete wavelet scales 23 and 24 and smoothing function scale 22 are extracted. Afterwards, segments including samples of the QRS complex, P and T waves are estimated via an approximation criterion and CLM is implemented to extract corresponding features from aforementioned scales, smoothing function and also from each original segment. The resulted feature vector (including 12 components) is used to tune an Adaptive Network Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) classifier. The presented strategy is applied to classify four categories found in the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database namely as Atrial Premature Beat (APB), Left Bundle Branch Block (LBBB), Right Bundle Branch Block (RBBB) and Premature Ventricular Contraction (PVC) and average values of Se = 99.81%, P+ = 99.80%, Sp = 99.81% and Acc = 99.72% are obtained for sensitivity, positive predictivity, specifity and accuracy respectively showing marginal improvement of the heart arrhythmia classification performance.

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In this study, a new long-duration holter electrocardiogram (ECG) major events detection-delineation algorithm is described which operates based on the false-alarm error bounded segmentation of a decision statistic with simple mathematical origin. To meet this end, first three-lead holter data is pre-processed by implementation of an appropriate bandpass finite-duration impulse response (FIR) filter and also by calculation of the Euclidean norm between corresponding samples of three leads. Then, a trous discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is applied to the resulted norm and an unscented synthetic measure is calculated between some obtained dyadic scales to magnify the effects of low-power waves such as P or T-waves during occurrence of arrhythmia(s). Afterwards, a uniform length window is slid sample to sample on the synthetic scale and in each slid, six features namely as summation of the nonlinearly amplified Hilbert transform, summation of absolute first order differentiation, summation of absolute second order differentiation, curve length, area and variance of the excerpted segment are calculated. Then all feature trends are normalized and superimposed to yield the newly defined multiple-order derivative wavelet based measure (MDWM) for the detection and delineation of ECG events. In the next step, a α-level Neyman-Pearson classifier (which is a false-alarm probability-FAP controlled tester) is implemented to detect and delineate QRS complexes. To show advantages of the presented method, it is applied to MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database, QT Database, and T-Wave Alternans Database and as a result, the average values of sensitivity and positive predictivity Se = 99.96% and P+ = 99.96% are obtained for the detection of QRS complexes, with the average maximum delineation error of 5.7 msec, 3.8 msec and 6.1 msec for P-wave, QRS complex and T-wave, respectively showing marginal improvement of detection-delineation performance. In the next step, the proposed method is applied to DAY hospital high resolution holter data (more than 1,500,000 beats including Bundle Branch Blocks-BBB, Premature Ventricular Complex-PVC and Premature Atrial Complex-PAC) and average values of Se=99.98% and P+=99.97% are obtained for QRS detection. In summary, marginal performance improvement of ECG events detection-delineation process in a widespread values of signal to noise ratio (SNR), reliable robustness against strong noise, artifacts and probable severe arrhythmia(s) of high resolution holter data and the processing speed 163,000 samples/sec can be mentioned as important merits and capabilities of the proposed algorithm.

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The paper addresses a new QRS complex geometrical feature extraction technique as well as its application for electrocardiogram (ECG) supervised hybrid (fusion) beat-type classification. To this end, after detection and delineation of the major events of ECG signal via a robust algorithm, each QRS region and also its corresponding discrete wavelet transform (DWT) are supposed as virtual images and each of them is divided into eight polar sectors. Then, the curve length of each excerpted segment is calculated and is used as the element of the feature space. To increase the robustness of the proposed classification algorithm versus noise, artifacts and arrhythmic outliers, a fusion structure consisting of three Multi Layer Perceptron-Back Propagation (MLP-BP) neural networks with different topologies and one Adaptive Network Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) were designed and implemented. To show the merit of the new proposed algorithm, it was applied to all MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database records and the discrimination power of the classifier in isolation of different beat types of each record was assessed and as the result, the average accuracy value Acc=98.27% was obtained. Also, the proposed method was applied to 8 number of arrhythmias (Normal, LBBB, RBBB, PVC, APB, VE, PB, VF) belonging to 19 number of the aforementioned database and the average value of Acc=98.08% was achieved. To evaluate performance quality of the new proposed hybrid learning machine, the obtained results were compared with similar peer-reviewed studies in this area.