Filtration and Classification of ECG Signals

Abstract

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a kind of process of recording the electrical activity/signals of the heart with respect to the time. ECG conveys a wide amount of information related to the structure and functions of the heart, its electrical conduction processes. ECG is a diagnostic tool that the doctors and medical professionals use to measure patients' heart activity by paying attention to the electric current flowing in the heart. Due to the presence of noises, it needs to carry out the filtration process. Filtration is the process of keeping the components of the signals of desired frequencies by setting up an “fc” value and removing the components apart from the said “fc” frequency. It is required to eliminate the noise level from the ECG signal, such that the resultant ECG signal must be free from noises. All these techniques and algorithms have their advantages and limitations which are discussed in this chapter.