Performance Analysis of Ten Common QRS Detectors on Different ECG Application Cases

A systematical evaluation work was performed on ten widely used and high-efficient QRS detection algorithms in this study, aiming at verifying their performances and usefulness in different application situations. Four experiments were carried on six internationally recognized databases. Firstly, in the test of high-quality ECG database versus low-quality ECG database, for high signal quality database, all ten QRS detection algorithms had very high detection accuracy (F1 >99%), whereas the F1 results decrease significantly for the poor signal-quality ECG signals (all <80%). Secondly, in the test of normal ECG database versus arrhythmic ECG database, all ten QRS detection algorithms had good F1 results for these two databases (all >95% except RS slope algorithm with 94.24% on normal ECG database and 94.44% on arrhythmia database). Thirdly, for the paced rhythm ECG database, all ten algorithms were immune to the paced beats (>94%) except the RS slope method, which only output a low F1 result of 78.99%. At last, the detection accuracies had obvious decreases when dealing with the dynamic telehealth ECG signals (all <80%) except OKB algorithm with 80.43%. Furthermore, the time costs from analyzing a 10 s ECG segment were given as the quantitative index of the computational complexity. All ten algorithms had high numerical efficiency (all <4 ms) except RS slope (94.07 ms) and sixth power algorithms (8.25 ms). And OKB algorithm had the highest numerical efficiency (1.54 ms).