ELECTROCARDIOGRAM ARRHYTHMIA PATTERN RECOGNITION BASED ON AN IMPROVED WAVELET NEURAL NETWORK

Electrocardiography (ECG) is a transthoracic interpretation of the electrical activity of the heart over a period of time, as detected by electrodes attached to the outer surface of the skin and recorded by a device external to the body. ECG signal classification is very important for the clinical detection of arrhythmia. This paper presents an application of an improved wavelet neural network structure to the classification of the ECG beats, because of the high precision and fast learning rate. Feature extraction method in this paper is wavelet transform. Our experimental data set is taken from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The correct detection rate of QRS wave is 95% by testing the data of MIT-BIH database. The proposed methods are applied to a large number of ECG signals consisting of 600 training samples and 120 test samples from the MIT-BIH database. The samples equally represent six different ECG signal types, including normal beat, atrial premature beat, ventricular premature beat, left bundle branch block, right bundle branch block and paced beat. In comparison with pattern recognition methods of BP neural networks, RBF neural networks and Support Vector Machines (SVM), the results in this experiment prove that the wavelet neural network method has a better recognition rate when classifying electrocardiogram signals. The experimental results prove that supposed method in this paper is effective for arrhythmia pattern recognition field.