Removal of Noise and Diagnosis of Heart Diseases Using ECG Signal Processing

The electrocardiogram is a diagnostic tool that measures and records the electrical activity of heart in exquisite detail. This will get differ from the normal recordings, if there is any heart disease. We have taken into account the R-R interval based diseases. For this many methods are available to extract the information from the recorded ECG signal. Among them ‘SO and CHAN’ and ‘PAN and TOMPKINS’ are the most popular methods. From the ‘PAN and TOMPKINS’ method we have adopted certain steps and included our own ideas to diagnose the R-R interval based heart diseases. For this we have used the ECG signal from the physionet.org and MATLAB as a tool for the diagnosis purpose. We have written MATLAB programs and have executed them by using the signal obtained as mentioned above. By using our algorithm we have calculated the number of heart beats in a particular time interval, position of the R peaks and the R-R interval. By doing so for the normal and the abnormal signals, we have diagnosed the R-R interval based diseases like PVC. Keywords-ECG, R-R interval, PVC, No. of heart beats.