A lightweight piecewise linear synthesis method for standard 12-lead ECG signals based on adaptive region segmentation

This paper presents a lightweight synthesis algorithm, named adaptive region segmentation based piecewise linear (ARSPL) algorithm, for reconstructing standard 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from a 3-lead subset (I, II and V2). Such a lightweight algorithm is particularly suitable for healthcare mobile devices with limited resources for computing, communication and data storage. After detection of R-peaks, the ECGs are segmented by cardiac cycles. Each cycle is further divided into four regions according to different cardiac electrical activity stages. A personalized linear regression algorithm is then applied to these regions respectively for improved ECG synthesis. The proposed ARSPL method has been tested on 39 subjects randomly selected from the PTB diagnostic ECG database and achieved accurate synthesis of remaining leads with an average correlation coefficient of 0.947, an average root-mean-square error of 55.4μV, and an average runtime performance of 114ms. Overall, these results are significantly better than those of the common linear regression method, the back propagation (BP) neural network and the BP optimized using the genetic algorithm. We have also used the reconstructed ECG signals to evaluate the denivelation of ST segment, which is a potential symptom of intrinsic myocardial disease. After ARSPL, only 10.71% of the synthesized ECG cycles are with a ST-level synthesis error larger than 0.1mV, which is also better than those of the three above-mentioned methods.