Two well-known and respected editors have assembled an outstanding group of electrophysiologists/physicians to write a major work representing the field of electrocardiography as we know it today. This book contains all the major subject areas within the field of electrocardiography with significant clinical and basic content to appeal to the entire electrophysiology community in addition to educating cardiologists with the latest information. The fact that Drs. Malik and Camm have edited this work assures a volume of incredible quality and readability.

Electrocardiography for Health Care Personnel prepares users for a national ECG certification examination, as well as providing ECG skills training for health care students and health care personnel who are interested in mastering additional skills. The text includes the essential skills needed to perform an ECG, including anatomy of the heart, basic characteristics, equipment, appropriate intervention, and other technical applications, such as Holter monitoring and stress testing. Emphasis throughout the text is placed on troubleshooting.

For centuries the analysis of the heart rhythm has belonged to the foundations of medical art. We know that doctors in ancient Tibet used the interpretation of the heart rate to draw prognostic conclusions—somehow a modern rationale—that deserves further attention. The rapid advancement of science is providing more and more information about the details, but the subatomic resolution of structures hides the risk and the complex procedures are fragmented into static impressions. The same has happened to the ECG. The revolutionary development, acknowledged by the Nobel Prize for Einthoven, ledfromtheanalysisofthedynamicheartratetothestaticanalysisofthe heartstream curve. It is only with the ECG Holter recording over longer periods that the cardiologists rediscovered the old dynamic. With the continuous recording of the heart rate and its periodicity, it became accessible to a new dimension, a dim- sion that requires technically well-de?ned foundations for accurate data coll- tion, detailed knowledge of the electrocardiologic particularities of arrhythmia, and medical knowledge for the translation of the results into a diagnostic synthesis. With the ECG Holter the issue is no longer just to detect an arrhythmia, but also to determine dynamic circumstance in which the critical event occurred. In fact, we investigate the trigger, the event, and the context, and we have to integrate all of that information within the clinical picture, from the pathology right through to the symptom—indeed a multi-dimensional task.

This book discusses feature engineering and computational intelligence solutions for ECG monitoring, with a particular focus on how these methods can be efficiently used to address the emerging challenges of dynamic, continuous & long-term individual ECG monitoring and real-time feedback. By doing so, it provides a “snapshot” of the current research at the interface between physiological signal analysis and machine learning. It also helps clarify a number of dilemmas and encourages further investigations in this field, to explore rational applications of feature engineering and computational intelligence in ECG monitoring. The book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the field of biomedical engineering, ECG signal processing, and intelligent healthcare.