Last Updated on November 23, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
ECG lead is an old term from electrocardiography. A 3 lead ECG is gold standard for heart rate measurements means for instance that an ECG device which as 3 ECG channels which are amplified separately from each other is gold standard. This means we reach with this configuration the most accurate configuration which is possible.
Unfortunately we have found a lof of people who describe the following configruation as a 3 lead ECG device:
We have seen this very often. We therefore will use «3 channel ECG» instead of «3 lead ECG». But according to the definition the above picture shows a single lead ECG device with 3 electrodes. A 3 lead device would consist of 3 such modules which are shown in the above picture integraded in parallel into a single device with 3 seperate channels which are amplified independently.
Most modern ECG devices have a digital amplification of the ECG channels. The old definition for ECG leads comes from a time where old devices where used where different «leads» could be choosen for instance by manually switching from one lead to the other, but these devices are only used rarely today.