A survey on ECG analysis

The electrocardiogram (ECG) signal basically corresponds to the electrical activity of the heart. In the literature, the ECG signal has been analyzed and utilized for various purposes, such as measuring the heart rate, examining the rhythm of heartbeats, diagnosing heart abnormalities, emotion recognition and biometric identification. ECG analysis (depending on the type of the analysis) can contain several steps, such as preprocessing, feature extraction, feature selection, feature transformation and classification. Performing each step is crucial for the sake of the related analysis. In addition, the employed success measures and appropriate constitution of the ECG signal database play important roles in the analysis as well. In this work, the literature on ECG analysis, mostly from the last decade, is comprehensively reviewed based on all of the major aspects mentioned above. Each step in ECG analysis is briefly described, and the related studies are provided.