An evaluation tool for wave delineation in ECG processing: Wxw

Abstract

Evaluating research results is not always an easy task. Although it is interesting to compare personal achievements against similar works from other researchers, in many ocassions it is hard to replicate exactly the same conditions, because papers do not reflect all the variables of the context. To mitigate this problem, some standard systems have been created for researchers to unify this step in their works. One example of this is the bxb (beat-by-beat) tool from PhysioNet's PhysioToolkit, developed to compare results in beat detection. Delineation is an important part inside Electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnostic systems, because it is necessary to properly identify waves inside the beats. Besides the position of each wave into the signal, onset and offset positions for a wave are also needed. The more precise these positions are, the better the diagnostic is. But unlike the case of the beat detection, there are no generic tools for delineation evaluation, and papers that deepen in this subject in most cases do not explain clearly how they get their results, or directly asked an expert to supervise the outcome of their systems. Because of this, the main purpose of the present work is to introduce an evaluation tool, named wxw, to assess wave delineation for a computer-aided ECG diagnostic system.