ELECTROCARDIOGRAM BEAT CLASSIFICATION USING S-TRANSFORM BASED FEATURE SET

Abstract

In this paper, the conventional Stockwell transform is effectively used to classify the ECG arrhythmias. The performance of ECG classification mainly depends on feature extraction based on an efficient formation of morphological and temporal features and the design of the classifier. Feature extraction is the important component of designing the system based on pattern recognition since even the best classifier will not perform better if the good features are not selected properly. Here, the S-transform (ST) is used to extract the morphological features which is appended with temporal features. This feature set is independently classified using artificial neural network (NN) and support vector machine (SVM). In this work, five classes of ECG beats (normal, ventricular, supra ventricular, fusion and unknown beats) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database are classified according to AAMI EC57 1998 standard (Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation). Performance is evaluated on several normal and abnormal ECG signals of MIT-BIH arrhythmias database using two classifier techniques: ST with NN classifier (ST-NN) and other proposed ST with SVM classifier (ST-SVM). The proposed method achieves accuracy of 98.47%. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with ST-NN and earlier reported technique.