CORRELATION DIMENSION ESTIMATION FROM ELECTROCARDIOGRAMS

In this work the correlation dimension (D-2) of electrocardiograms (ECG) has been computed on ECG recordings from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Data Base: 28 signals have been studied both analysing changes in D-2 estimations obtained processing different time-slices within the same ECG signal, and comparing the D-2 values computed from different subjects. We observed a greater time variation in the estimated D-2 from pathological subjects, while D-2 seems to be more repeatable in the case of healthy ones. Instead there is no clear evidence of significative differences in the D-2 values computed from normal and sick subjects. Since the presence of noise affecting the signal induces significant errors in D-2 estimates, we proposed the computation of the parameter alpha which gives us a rough information on the noise level.