Electro cardio graph converter

Abstract

Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. This has been a major issue confronting a uniform e-Health environment, more so in exchange of electronic health records (EHR). Our project, a blend of research and application development converts the Electro cardiograph (ECG) output files from equipment implementing major Health care standards into a standard format. The project has been done in collaboration with Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology, National Institute of Heart Diseases (AFICNIHD). Many ECG standards are being used around the globe. Our project focuses on three major standards, Health Level 7 (HL7), Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and Standard Communication Protocol for Computer-Assisted Electrocardiography (SCP-ECG). Our application reads the file from any of the three standards, extracts the waveform and encoded Meta data, translates it into an xml file and then converts it into DAT format. DAT format is the ECG file format used by MIT / Physionet for research purposes in the study of ECGs. ECGC is developed in Java. The ECG files converted by ECGC can be used by software packages that are format specific like VT Detection System and Cardio Genic. These systems can be deployed in a real time environment.