Electrocardiographic monitoring: an overview.

This article presents an overview of the key principles and methods underlying modern electrocardiographic (ECG) monitoring. Multilead processing, improved noise reduction techniques, and automatic lead-fail detection substantially enhance the reliability of ECG monitoring today. Computerized ECG signal processing provides reliable automatic arrhythmia detection, based on sophisticated waveform recognition and classification schemes. State-of-the-art ECG monitors carry out automatic ST segment analysis. They also detect and process pacemaker signals. A variety of signal-processing methods are described.