ECGdeli - An open source ECG delineation toolbox for MATLAB

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a standard cost-efficient and non-invasive tool for the early detection of various cardiac diseases. Quantifying different timing and amplitude features of and in between the single ECG waveforms can reveal important information about the underlying (dys-)function of the heart. Determining these features requires the detection of fiducial points that mark the on- and offset as well as the peak of each ECG waveform (P wave, QRS complex, T wave). Manually setting these points is time-consuming and requires a physician’s expert knowledge. Therefore, the highly modular ECGdeli toolbox for MATLAB was developed, which is capable of filtering clinically recorded 12-lead ECG signals and detecting the fiducial points, also called delineation. It is one of the few open toolboxes offering ECG delineation for P waves, T Waves and QRS complexes. The algorithms provided were evaluated with the QT database, an ECG database comprising 105 signals with fiducial points annotated by clinicians. The median difference between the fiducial points set by the boundary detection algorithm and the clinical annotations serving as a ground truth is less than 4 samples (16 ms) for the P wave and the QRS complex markers. The T wave onset, peak and offset were detected with a median difference of 5, 2 and 7 samples, respectively. Results were compared to two free algorithms available on PhysioNet. Our results show that ECGdeli can reliably detect P waves, QRS complexes and T waves. Thus, it can contribute to diagnose specific cardiac diseases by analyzing the ECG signal. As ECGdeli is published under GNU GPLv3 and thanks to its modularity, it can be used to extend existing algorithms or as a benchmark for new algorithms.