Compression of electrocardiogram signals using compressive sensing technique based on curvelet transform toward medical applications

Abstract Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals can be monitored from many patients based on healthcare systems. To enhance these systems, the ECG signals should be collected and then stored in a cloud platform for later analysis. Hence, ECG signals can be utilized to diagnose heart diseases. However, the ECG signals require great internet capacity. So, compression techniques can be implemented to reduce a memory storage capacity for these signals. One of the potential compression techniques is the compressive sensing (CS). This paper proposes a CS technique to compress ECG signals. This technique is used to reduce sampling rates of the ECG signals to be less than the Nyquist rate. Moreover, a framework is suggested for the compression of maternal and fetal ECG signals. The compression of these signals is based on the curvelet transform (CT) to produce sparsity in ECG signals. The MIT-BIH database are utilized for testing the ECG signals. This database includes several ECG signals with various sampling rates, such as aberrant and normal signals. The proposed CS technique achieved a compression ratio (CR) of 15.7 with an accuracy of 98.2%. Also, a percentage root mean difference (PRD) is utilized to calculate the performance of the reconstructed ECG signals. The achieved value of the PRD is 2.0.