PESC: A parallel system for clustering ECG streams based on MapReduce

Abstract

Nowadays, cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become a disease of the majority. As an important instrument for diagnosing CVD, electrocardiography (ECG) is used to extract useful information about the functioning status of the heart. In the domain of ECG analysis, cluster analysis is a commonly applied approach to gain an overview of the data, detect outliers or pre-process before further analysis. In recent years, to provide better medical care for CVD patients, the cardiac telehealth system has been widely used. However, the extremely large volume and high update rate of data in the telehealth system has made cluster analysis challenging work. In this paper, we design and implement a novel parallel system for clustering massive ECG stream data based on the MapReduce framework. In our approach, a global optimum of clustering is achieved by merging and splitting clusters dynamically. Meanwhile, a good performance is gained by distributing computation over multiple computing nodes. According to the evaluation, our system not only provides good clustering results but also has an excellent performance on multiple computing nodes.