Percentage Area Difference (PAD) as a measure of distortion and its use in Maximum Enclosed Area (MEA), a new ECG signal compression algorithm

Abstract

A new measure of distortion, named the Percentage Area Difference (PAD), is proposed as an alternative to existing ways of evaluating the performance of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal lossy compression. This novel distortion measure, which corresponds to the area enclosed between the original and the reconstructed signal, is also used as a maximum tolerance comparison criterion in a new non-uniform sampling method, designated Maximum Enclosed Area algorithm (MEA), which is proposed here for direct ECG signal compression.