Detection of electrocardiogram signals using an efficient method

•A novel hybrid intelligent method for recognition of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is proposed.•A proper set of the higher order statistics features and timing features is proposed.•Radial basis function neural network is used as the classifier.•Bees algorithm is proposed for optimization of the recognizer.•Simulation results show that the proposed system has high recognition accuracy.

Automatic detection of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is very important for clinical diagnosis of heart disease. This paper investigates the design of a three-step system for recognition of the five types of ECG beat. In the first step, stationary wavelet transform (SWT) is used for noise reduction of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Feature extraction module extracts higher order statistics of ECG signals in combination with three timing interval features. Then hybrid Bees algorithm-radial basis function (RBF_BA) technique is used to classify the five types of electrocardiogram (ECG) beat. The suggested method can accurately classify and discriminate normal (Normal) and abnormal heartbeats. Abnormal heartbeats include left bundle branch block (LBBB), right bundle branch block (RBBB), atrial premature contractions (APC) and premature ventricular contractions (PVC). Finally, the classification capability of five different classes of ECG signals is attained over eight files from the MIT/BIH arrhythmia database. Simulation results show that classification accuracy of 95.79% for the first dataset (4000 beats) and an overall accuracy of detection of 95.18% are achieved over eight files from the MIT/BIH arrhythmia database.

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