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An Open Source ECG Toolkit with SCP-ECG, XML aECG and DICOM.

Marcel de Wijs

Thoraxcenter, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

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Unlike the ubiquitous use of DICOM for sharing various medical image modalities, the storage and retrieval of digital 12-lead electrocardiograms across different ECG management systems is often limited to manual file-based export and import using vendorspecific solutions. In addition to SCP-ECG, a number of open standard initiatives have been introduced, such as DICOM-ECG and HL7 aECG. By extending and improving a previously developed ECG toolkit we have explored the capabilities of these open standards in terms of interoperability, filesize and transmission times. The ECG toolkit is almost entirely available under the Apache License Version 2.0.
More details can be found in the paper (pdf, 211 KB) presented at Computers in Cardiology 2008, Bologna, Italy, while the open source software can be be downloaded from sourceforge. A new version (2.1) will be published at the end of November 2008.