ECG compression using Ziv-Lempel techniques.

The strong regularity in an ECG recording suggests that data compression techniques based on finding and efficiently coding repetitions in the data are likely to be effective. It is shown how the LZ77 compression method due to Ziv and Lempel can be adapted to ECG compression. Experimental results show the new algorithm to be highly effective. Some enhancements to the basic compression algorithm to reduce noise in the decompressed trace are described and experimentally verified.