The establishment of the clinical electrocardiograph (ECG) by the Dutch physician Willem Einthoven in 1903 marked the beginning of a new era in medical diagnostic techniques, including the entry of electronics into health care. Since then, electronics, and subsequently computers, have become integral components of biomedical signal analysis systems, performing a variety of tasks from data acquisition and preprocessing for removal of artifacts to feature extraction and interpretation. The clinically relevant information in the signal is often masked by noise and interference, and the signal...