In this article, an improved and more efficient algorithm for the compression of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is presented, which combines the processes of modeling ECG signal by variable-length classified signature and envelope vector sets (VL-CSEVS), and residual error coding via wavelet transform. In particular, we form the VL-CSEVS derived from the ECG signals, which exploits the relationship between energy variation and clinical information. The VL-CSEVS are unique patterns generated from many of thousands of ECG segments of two different lengths obtained by the energy based segmentation method, then they are presented to both the transmitter and the receiver used in our proposed compression system. The proposed algorithm is tested on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database and MIT-BIH Compression Test Database and its performance is evaluated by using some evaluation metrics such as the percentage root-mean-square difference (PRD), modified PRD (MPRD), maximum error, and clinical evaluation. Our experimental results imply that our proposed algorithm achieves high compression ratios with low level reconstruction error while preserving the diagnostic information in the reconstructed ECG signal, which has been supported by the clinical tests that we have carried out.
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