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Electrocardiogram Classification, Individual Patient Recognition, AR Model, MIT/BIH Database.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is the recording of heart activity obtained by measuring the signals from electrical contacts placed on the skin of the patient. By analyzing ECG, it is possible to detect the rate and consistency of heartbeats and identify possible irregularities in heart operation. This paper describes a set of techniques employed to pre-process the ECG signals and extract a set of features – autoregressive (AR) signal parameters used to characterise ECG signal. Extracted parameters are in this work used to accomplish two tasks. Firstly, AR features belonging to each ECG signal are classified in groups corresponding to three different heart conditions – normal, arrhythmia and ventricular arrhythmia. Obtained classification results indicate accurate, zero-error classification of patients according to their heart condition using the proposed method. Sets of extracted AR coefficients are then extended by adding an additional parameter – power of AR modelling error and a suitability of developed technique for individual patient identification is investigated. Individual feature sets for each group of detected QRS sections are classified in p clusters where p represents the number of patients in each group. Developed system has been tested using ECG signals available in MIT/BIH and Politecnico of Milano VCG/ECG database. Achieved recognition rates indicate that patient identification using ECG signals could be considered as a possible approach in some applications using the system developed in this work. Pre-processing stages, applied parameter extraction techniques and some intermediate and final classification results are described and presented in this paper.