Electrocardiography

ECG WAVEFORM SYNTHESIZER

Claudio Lamberti, Guido Fanti

Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica

Universita' di Bologna, viale Risorgimento 2 ,
4 0 1 3 6 Bologna,Italy.

A technique for
ABSTRACT
electrocardiogram (ECG)
*t R
synthesis is presented. The synthesizer is based on
the definition of several characteristic points
with zero first derivative; it describes the ECG
signal morphology by piece-wise cubic approximation
and incorporates routines to alter the basic
signal with power-line and random noise errors. The
synthesized ECG signal is being used for QRS
detector evaluation.

INTRODUCTION
Several hardware simulators generating analog
signals have been proposed, mainly by manufacturers
I
1
S
*T
for the testing of equipment. Moreover digital Figure 1
technique allows. to directly produce a digital Figure 1 shows characteristic points for a regular
signal simulating the real one with much more beat . Ti and Ai denote time and amplitude for the
flexibility (synthesizer) . Not many synthesizers characteristic point Pi = Pi (Ai,Ti).
have been presented in literature, most of them We can take advantage of such characteristic points
utilizing ECG signal linearization [l]. to extrapolate ECG tracing between time T(i-1) and
The aim of this paper is to present an ECG Ti by a cubic polynomial such as:
synthesizer based on the definition of several 3 2
characteristic points and on the use of cubic yi (x) = ai x + bi x + ci x + di
spline for the generation of samples.
where x = T - T(i-1) is a local variable defined
THE SYNTHESIZER between T(i-1) and Ti. The coefficients ai, bi, ci
The approach adopted for ECG signal synthesis and di can be calculated imposing the condition
connects a given point to its neighbour by a piece- that the curve passes through P(i-1) and Pi with
wise polynomial approximation. Instead of using zero first derivative.
linear approximation, usually adopted for similar As an example, if the set of values reported in
purposes, polynomial approximation is preferred to Table 1 is attributed to the characteristic points,
maintain many of the continuity features typical of the trace reported in Figure 2 is obtained.
the real ECG signal. Moreover most of the
algorithms for ECG analysis are based on first Amp P = 3000 Time P = 50
derivative continuity. Therefore such features must Amp EndP = 0 Time EndP = 80

be 'included in a tool devoted to evaluation of the

Amp Q = -1500 Time Q = 100
Amp R = 22000 Time R = 120
performances of such algorithms. Amp S = -2300 Time S = 150
An ECG tracing can be ideally subdivided into Amp J = 500 Time J = 1so
pieces joining characteristic points with zero Amp T = 4000 TimeT = 215
Amp EndT = 0 Time EndT = 270
first derivatives (P,Q,R,S,J,T points). RR I n t = 700 No. o f Beats = 2

Table I

IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE & BIOLOGY SOCIETY 1lTH ANNUAL IlSTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE--0767
CH2770-6/89/0000-0767 $01.00 C 1989 IEEE
 The proposed method for ECG signal generation has
been validated by comparing real tracings with the
corresponding synthesized ones. The synthesized
tracing has been obtained by assigning the values
obtained by minimizing the error between real and
synthesized tracings to characteristic points.

Figure 2
Ectopic beats are generated in the same way as
regular beats by setting different shape
parameters. An example of ectopic beat generation
is reported in Figure 3.

Figure 6

Figure 3
To simulate a noisy signal as it is in the clinical
environment, each sample value can be altered by
adding a value corresponding to a pre-established
noise level. White noise is simulated by adding the
values obtained from a random number generator,
-.. .* 3
_. .--,+., , .--,"
7'-n
"r----
while for power-line noise simulation a sinusoidal
function with a 50 Hz period is used. Figure 4 Figure 7
reports a tracing obtained by superimposing a white The upper trace in Figure 6 is the real one, while
noise simulation on the original synthesized the lower trace is the synthesized one. Figure 7
signal; while the tracing reported in Figure 5 has shows the absolute differences between the two.
been obtained by superimposing a 50 Hz power-line
noise simulation on the signal reported in Figure 4 CONCLUSIONS
A technique to generate digital ECG signals has
been presented. It is implementated on a personal
computer and it is general enough to allow the

A synthesized signal to be used for testing of QRS

detection and pattern recognition algorithms [2].

REFERENCES
L. Sornmo and 0. P a h h : "Evaluation of noise
immunity for algorithms in exercise ECG
analysis". Proc. IEEE Computers $ Cardiology,
Figure 4 pp. 349-352, 1984.
M. Grulli, C. Lamberti, M. Longhi Gelati, G.
L Neri : "A 24-hour monitoring system for
ambulatory patient". Proc. IEEE Computers &
Cardio1o~y.p~.577-580, 1987.

ADDRESS
Claudio Lamberti, D.E.I.S., Universita di Bologna,
Viale Risorgimento 2 , 40136 BOLOGNA, ITALY.

0768--IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE C BIOLOGY SOCIETY llTH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE