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ECG (Electrocardiography)

What is ECG?

Electrocardiography (ECG/EKG) records the electrical activity of the heart over time using electrodes placed on the skin. It's the gold standard for cardiac monitoring and is used to detect:

  • Arrhythmias (atrial fibrillation, ventricular tachycardia)
  • Myocardial infarction (heart attack)
  • Conduction abnormalities
  • Heart rate and HRV

The ECG waveform consists of the characteristic P-QRS-T complex, where the sharp QRS complex represents ventricular depolarization.

Signal Characteristics

Property Value
Typical sampling rate 250–500 Hz
Useful bandwidth 0.5–40 Hz
Morphology Sharp QRS complexes, smooth P and T waves
Key challenge Preserving QRS timing and amplitude

ECG in compressionKIT

TODO

ECG support is currently tracked as follow-on work. Some earlier experimentation remains available in legacy/, and a modular pipeline matching the PPG architecture is planned.

Current State

The currently documented ECG path is not yet at parity with PPG, but the earlier ECG experiments used the same broad RVQ autoencoder approach:

  • Data source: HDF5 files with pre-segmented ECG arrays
  • Configurations available: 8× to 64× compression ratios
  • Model: Same Conv2D encoder/decoder + RVQ bottleneck

Reference Configurations

Config Stages Levels Compression Notes
ecg_rvq_08x_ds16_l4 4 4 8× High quality
ecg_rvq_16x_ds16_l2 4 2 16× Balanced
ecg_rvq_32x_ds16_l1 4 1 32× High compression
ecg_rvq_64x_ds32_l1 5 1 64× Maximum compression

Planned Improvements

  • Migrate to modular compressionkit.datasets.ecg module
  • Add Pydantic config (EcgRvqConfig)
  • CLI entry point (train-ecg-rvq)
  • QRS-aware loss functions
  • Wearable single-lead ECG support