In this paper, a hybrid of self-organizing feature map and learning ve
ctor quantization and a rule base classification for the extraction of
structural primitives of ECG signals is presented. Structural primiti
ves are the elementary building blocks of an ECG signal and they are u
sed in the syntactic recognition and analysis of the signal. The analy
sis based on the coding by the codebook vectors and slope rules was as
successful as the analysis of the manually labelled test set.