ECG Beat Classification using a Sliding Window and Correlation of the Three-bit Linear Prediction Error Signal

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is responsible for half of all deaths due to heart disease. Most SCAs could be avoided by obtaining an early diagnosis from ECG recordings. The long-term monitoring systems record a large number of beats and require automatic detection and classification of the premature ventricular contraction (PVC) beats. Several ECG beat classification algorithms based on different methodologies have been developed and implemented. This paper presents a novel algorithm for automatic recognition of a premature ventricular contraction (PVC) beat based on a three-bit linear prediction error signal (LPES). The algorithm is composed of three main stages: signal denoising and QRS detection; nonlinear transformation of the linear prediction error signal e(n); and a sliding window. The proposed algorithm was tested using ECG signals from two recognized arrhythmia databases, MIT-BIH and AHA. The selected signals contained normal beats as well as abnormal beats. Sensitivity and specificity parameters were used to measure the accuracy of the proposed classifier. The sensitivity achieved using the proposed algorithm was 96.3% and the specificity was 99.0%. In addition to its accuracy, the main advantages of using the proposed algorithm are its simplicity and robustness.