Communication and storage of compressed resting and exercise ECGs using the revised SCP-ECG standard

Exercise ECG (XECG) testing is one of the clinical routine examinations which produces a large amount of data if full-disclosure records aree to be provided. We describe a system for XECG analysis which takes advantage of the data compression procedures and the data format of the SCP-ECG (Standard Communication Protocol for computer-assisted Electrocardiography) protocol. Processing the XECG data in consecutive 10-s data sections resulted in six SCP blocks per minute. Over a test set of 20 XECGs with various test durations, a median compression ratio of 11.1 has been achieved. We have also investigated the influence of noise on the compression ratio. 50 /spl mu/V RMS may reduce the compression ratio from /spl sim/17 to /spl sim/8.