Detection of the QRS complex by linear prediction

The electrocardiogram (ECG) represents the electrical activity of the heart. It is characterized by its recurrent or periodic behaviour with each beat. Each recurrence is composed of a wave sequence consisting of P, QRS and T-waves, where the most characteristic wave set is the QRS complex. In this paper, we have developed an algorithm for detection of the QRS complex. The algorithm consists of several steps: signal-to-noise enhancement, linear prediction for ECG signal analysis, nonlinear transform, moving window integrator, centre-clipping transformation and QRS detection. Linear prediction determines the coefficients of a forward linear predictor by minimizing the prediction error by a least-square approach. The residual error signal obtained after processing by the linear prediction algorithm has very significant properties which will be used to localize and detect QRS complexes. The detection algorithm is tested on ECG signals from the universal MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and compared with the Pan and Tompkins QRS detection method. The results we obtain show that our method performs better than this method. Our algorithm results in fewer false positives and fewer false negatives.