In cardiac patient-care, compression of long-term ECG data is essential to minimize the data storage requirement and transmission cost. Hence, this paper presents a novel electrocardiogram data compression technique which utilizes modified run-length encoding of wavelet coefficients.

First, wavelet transform is applied to the ECG data which decomposes it and packs maximum energy to less number of transform coefficients. The wavelet transform coefficients are quantized using dead-zone quantization. It discards small valued coefficients lying in the dead-zone interval while other coefficients are kept at the formulated quantized output interval. Among all the quantized coefficients, an average value is assigned to those coefficients for which energy packing efficiency is less than 99.99%. The obtained coefficients are encoded using modified run-length coding. It offers higher compression ratio than conventional run-length coding without any loss of information.

Compression performance of the proposed technique is evaluated using different ECG records taken from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The average compression performance in terms of compression ratio, percent root mean square difference, normalized percent mean square difference, and signal to noise ratio are 17.18, 3.92, 6.36, and 28.27 dB respectively for 48 ECG records.

The compression results obtained by the proposed technique is better than techniques recently introduced by others. The proposed technique can be utilized for compression of ECG records of Holter monitoring.