Diagnostic acceptability of FFT-based ECG data compression

There are three signal domains in which ECG data compression can be performed, namely time domain, frequency domain and parameter extraction. The present paper deals with the frequency domain method of compression using fast Fourier transform. The algorithm has been tested on the third set of the CSE database library. A performance evaluation has been made using two important parameters, namely compression ratio and percent root-mean-square difference besides visual comparison. Further, in order to know the clinical acceptable quality of the reconstructed signal peak, boundary and interval measurements were made both on the reconstructed and the original signal of the same record for comparison. The visual examination reveals that most of the noise in the original signal had been filtered out during the compression. This amounts to reduction of electromyographic noise to a considerable extent. The experimental observations show that a compression ratio of 8 is feasible while ensuring clinical acceptability.