4 Final Remarks

This text contains the second part of our tutorial papers on "How to implement SCP". It contains technical details for the implementers of SCP and refers, following section by section, to clauses where specific attention of the programmer may be required for generating a record that is compatible to the standard.

Having analyzed a couple of SCP implementations we realized that in particular the compression algorithm as described in Appendix C gives rise to hesitance and errors at implementation. We have therefore in detail given information on Huffman encoding (including a small numerical example) and a number of practical hints to realize the somewhat sophisticated structure of the high compressed ECG data.

Although the effort for implementation of this high compression may be remarkable the advantages of the results are significant: if correctly implemented the user needs only to store these data and neither measurement nor interpretative results because measurements and interpretation may be exactly (5 microV amplitude level, 2 ms level) restored after decompression.

It should also be noted that conversion of original or of reconstructed data might be formatted into XML messages. Furthermore it can be foreseen that measurements events and interpretative statements may be encoded following the recently released nomenclatures of CEN ENV 13734 and of the joint IEEE - FDA - XML - Group. SCP does not prevent such data formatting but provides the memory saving compressed storage of ECG raw data in large databases.