Determination of maximum noise level in an ECG channel under SURE Wavelet filtering for HRV extraction

ABSTRACT

Abstract Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is the measure of variation between R-R interbeats, it has been demonstrated to be a good representation of physiological features, especially to the alterations in the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). Considering the values that compose a HRV distribution are extracted from electrocardiography (ECG), many of the electrical disturbances that affect ECG-based diagnosis can also interfere with the results of the HRV analysis. This paper uses a 30-minute portion of a healthy patient (no arrhythmias detected or annotated) from the MIT-BIH ECG database to analyze the effectiveness of the SURE Wavelet denoising method for extracting the HRV from a progressively noisier ECG channel. Results show that the minimum SNR for reliable HRV extraction under these conditions is approximately 5dB and outlines the exponential behavior of HRV extraction for escalating noise levels in the ECG signal.