Performance and productivity benefits using multi-core processors for the analysis of digital long-term ECG recordings

Modern Holter recorders allow the acquisition of 12 lead ECGs with a sampling rate of 1 KHz or higher and a resolution of 16 bits over more than 24 h. While large volumes of data can be easily stored on flash memory cards the analysis of these biosignals requires considerable calculation power and network bandwidth. In general, processing time is important when hundreds of digital recordings from large study groups need to be analyzed. The objective of the following investigation is to address the question: Can performance and productivity benefits in ECG analysis be achieved using multi-core processor technology? Because these processors have two or more processing cores they can perform parallel processing. The results show that segmentation of Holter data and running the same program multiple times simultaneously can dramatically speedup the computing performance.