Abstract

An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a bioelectrical signal which records the heart's electrical

activity versus time. It is an important diagnostic tool for assessing heart functions. The
early detection of arrhythmia is very important for the cardiac patients. ECG is a test that
measures the electrical activity of the heart. The signals that make the heart's muscle
fibers contract come from the senatorial node, which is the natural pacemaker of the
heart. In an ECG test, the electrical impulses made while the heart is beating are recorded
and usually shown on paper, and records any problems with the heart's rhythm.

ECG arrhythmia can be defined as any of a group of conditions in which the electrical
activity of the heart is irregular and can cause heartbeat to be slow or fast. It can take
place in a healthy heart and be of minimal consequence, but they may also indicate a
serious problem that leads to stroke or sudden cardiac death. As ECG signal being non
stationary signal, the arrhythmia may occur at random in the time-scale, which means, the
arrhythmia symptoms may not show up all the time but would manifest at certain
irregular intervals during the day. Therefore, for effective diagnostics, the variability of
ECG signal may have to be observed over several hours. For this reason, together with
the fact that the volume of the ECG data is enormous, the study is tedious and time
consuming. Thus, automatic classification of arrhythmia is critical in clinical cardiology,
especially for the treatment of patients in the intensive care unit.

The pre-processing of ECG signal is incorporated with help of Wavelet toolbox wherein
baseline wandering, denoising and removal of high frequency and low frequency is
performed to improve SNR ratio of ECG signal. The Wavelet toolbox is used for feature
extraction of ECG signal.

In this project Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is used to classify the type of arrhythmia
the ECG signal is facing. The complete project is implemented on MATLAB/Simulink
(7.11 (R2011b) version) platform.

The performance is evaluated with help of MITBIH Database. There are different types
of arrhythmia classes including normal beat, Tachycardia, Bradycardia left bundle branch
block beat, right bundle branch beat, premature ventricular contraction, fusion of
ventricular and atrial premature contraction and paced beat are classified.