Syntactic Pattern Analysis of 24-Hour Holter Records

Abstract

Twenty-four years after its introduction by Holter (1957) the long-term recording and subsequent analysis for arrhythmias of electrocardiographic data is finding ever increasing clinical application. The scanning procedure orignally described by Holter continues to be the most common technique for analysis of these records. However, the large amounts of physician’s and technician’s time needed for interpretation and production of the condensed records contributes significantly towards costs. Many efforts have been made to computerise the procedure (Cox et al., 1968; Gustafson et al., 1978; Kinias and Fozzard, 1979) yet none have, to our knowledge, achieved routine clinical application. In this chapter we describe a form of syntactical pattern recognition (Tou and Gonzales, 1974) for the analysis of 24-hour Holter records.