An Automatic Algorithm for P/T-Wave Detection based on Auxiliary Waveform

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is a common diagnostic basis for heart disease. Reliable waveform detection method for ECG has important applications in clinical diagnosis. This work proposes a new method for P- and T- wave detection based on auxiliary waveform. The algorithm includes three parts: preprocessing, construction of auxiliary waveforms and P- and T-wave position detection. First, the ECG signal is preprocessed to remove baseline drift and high-frequency noise. Then, the auxiliary waveforms is constructed in the P- and T-wave searching windows which are defined based on the QRS wave position. Next, on the basis of the prominence of the auxiliary waveform, each lead of the 12-lead ECG signal is weighted and the final auxiliary waveform is constructed. Finally the P/T-wave positions are detected according to the auxiliary waveform memory. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a 12-lead manually annotated database. Standard deviations of 26.55 and 30.92 ms were obtained for the onset and offset of T-wave respectively, the standard deviation of the onset and offset of P-wave is 13.25 and 15.7 ms. The algorithm we proposed can provide reference for following research.