A Review of Signal Processing Techniques for Electrocardiogram Signal Quality Assessment.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal quality assessment (SQA) plays a vital role in significantly improving the diagnostic accuracy and reliability of unsupervised ECG analysis systems. In practice, the ECG signal is often corrupted with different kinds of noises and artifacts. Therefore, numerous SQA methods were presented based on the ECG signal and/or noise features and the machine learning classifiers and/or heuristic decision rules. This paper presents an overview of current state-of-the-art SQA methods and highlights the practical limitations of the existing SQA methods. Based upon past and our studies, it is noticed that a lightweight ECG noise analysis framework is highly demanded for real-time detection, localization, and classification of single and combined ECG noises within the context of wearable ECG monitoring devices which are often resource constrained.

Automated ECG Noise Detection and Classification System for Unsupervised Healthcare Monitoring.

OBJECTIVE: Automatic detection and classification of noises can play a vital role in the development of robust unsupervised electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis systems. This paper proposes a novel unified framework for automatic detection, localization, and classification of single and combined ECG noises. METHODS: The proposed framework consists of the modified ensemble empirical mode decomposition (CEEMD), the short-term temporal feature extraction, and the decision-rule-based noise detection and classification. In the proposed framework, ECG signals are first decomposed using the modified CEEMD algorithm for discriminating the ECG components from the noises and artifacts. Then, the short-term temporal features such as maximum absolute amplitude, number of zerocrossings, and local maximum peak amplitude of the autocorelation function are computed from the extracted high-frequency and low-frequency signals. Finally, a decision rule-based algorithm is presented for detecting the presence of noises and classifying the processed ECG signals into six signal groups: noise-free ECG, ECG+BW, ECG+MA, ECG+PLI, ECG+BW+PLI, and ECG+BW+MA. RESULTS: The proposed framework is rigorously evaluated on five benchmark ECG databases and the real-time ECG signals. The proposed framework achieves an average sensitivity of 99.12%, specificity of 98.56%, and overall accuracy of 98.90% in detecting the presence of noises. Classification results show that the framework achieves an average sensitivity, positive predictivity, and classification accuracy of 98.93%, 98.39%, and 97.38%, respectively. CONCLUSION: The proposed framework not only achieves better noise detection and classification rates than the current state-of-the-art methods but also accurately localizes short bursts of noises with low endpoint delineation errors. SIGNIFICANCE: Extensive studies on benchmark databases demonstrate that the proposed framework is more suitable for reducing false alarm rates and selecting appropriate noise-specific denoising techniques in automated ECG analysis applications.

Noise-aware dictionary-learning-based sparse representation framework for detection and removal of single and combined noises from ECG signal.

Automatic electrocardiogram (ECG) signal enhancement has become a crucial pre-processing step in most ECG signal analysis applications. In this Letter, the authors propose an automated noise-aware dictionary learning-based generalised ECG signal enhancement framework which can automatically learn the dictionaries based on the ECG noise type for effective representation of ECG signal and noises, and can reduce the computational load of sparse representation-based ECG enhancement system. The proposed framework consists of noise detection and identification, noise-aware dictionary learning, sparse signal decomposition and reconstruction. The noise detection and identification is performed based on the moving average filter, first-order difference, and temporal features such as number of turning points, maximum absolute amplitude, zerocrossings, and autocorrelation features. The representation dictionary is learned based on the type of noise identified in the previous stage. The proposed framework is evaluated using noise-free and noisy ECG signals. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce computational load as compared with conventional dictionary learning-based ECG denoising approaches. Further, comparative results show that the method outperforms existing methods in automatically removing noises such as baseline wanders, power-line interference, muscle artefacts and their combinations without distorting the morphological content of local waves of ECG signal.

Robust cardiac event change detection method for long-term healthcare monitoring applications.

A long-term continuous cardiac health monitoring system highly demands more battery power for real-time transmission of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals and increases bandwidth, treatment costs and traffic load of the diagnostic server. In this Letter, the authors present an automated low-complexity robust cardiac event change detection (CECD) method that can continuously detect specific changes in PQRST morphological patterns and heart rhythms and then enable transmission/storing of the recorded ECG signals. The proposed CECD method consists of four stages: ECG signal quality assessment, R-peak detection and beat waveform extraction, temporal and RR interval feature extraction and cardiac event change decision. The proposed method is tested and validated using both normal and abnormal ECG signals including different types of arrhythmia beats, heart rates and signal quality. Results show that the method achieves an average sensitivity of 99.76%, positive predictivity of 94.58% and overall accuracy of 94.32% in determining the changes in heartbeat waveforms of the ECG signals.

Robust detection of premature ventricular contractions using sparse signal decomposition and temporal features.

An automated noise-robust premature ventricular contraction (PVC) detection method is proposed based on the sparse signal decomposition, temporal features, and decision rules. In this Letter, the authors exploit sparse expansion of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals on mixed dictionaries for simultaneously enhancing the QRS complex and reducing the influence of tall P and T waves, baseline wanders, and muscle artefacts. They further investigate a set of ten generalised temporal features combined with decision-rule-based detection algorithm for discriminating PVC beats from non-PVC beats. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method is evaluated using 47 ECG recordings from the MIT/BIH arrhythmia database. Evaluation results show that the proposed method achieves an average sensitivity of 89.69%, and specificity 99.63%. Results further show that the proposed decision-rule-based algorithm with ten generalised features can accurately detect different patterns of PVC beats (uniform and multiform, couplets, triplets, and ventricular tachycardia) in presence of other normal and abnormal heartbeats.

Unified framework for triaxial accelerometer-based fall event detection and classification using cumulants and hierarchical decision tree classifier.

In this Letter, the authors present a unified framework for fall event detection and classification using the cumulants extracted from the acceleration (ACC) signals acquired using a single waist-mounted triaxial accelerometer. The main objective of this Letter is to find suitable representative cumulants and classifiers in effectively detecting and classifying different types of fall and non-fall events. It was discovered that the first level of the proposed hierarchical decision tree algorithm implements fall detection using fifth-order cumulants and support vector machine (SVM) classifier. In the second level, the fall event classification algorithm uses the fifth-order cumulants and SVM. Finally, human activity classification is performed using the second-order cumulants and SVM. The detection and classification results are compared with those of the decision tree, naive Bayes, multilayer perceptron and SVM classifiers with different types of time-domain features including the second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-order cumulants and the signal magnitude vector and signal magnitude area. The experimental results demonstrate that the second- and fifth-order cumulant features and SVM classifier can achieve optimal detection and classification rates of above 95%, as well as the lowest false alarm rate of 1.03%.

Straightforward and robust QRS detection algorithm for wearable cardiac monitor.

This Letter presents a fairly straightforward and robust QRS detector for wearable cardiac monitoring applications. The first stage of the QRS detector contains a powerful ℓ1-sparsity filter with overcomplete hybrid dictionaries for emphasising the QRS complexes and suppressing the baseline drifts, powerline interference and large P/T waves. The second stage is a simple peak-finding logic based on the Gaussian derivative filter for automatically finding locations of R-peaks in the ECG signal. Experiments on the standard MIT-BIH arrythmia database show that the method achieves an average sensitivity of 99.91% and positive predictivity of 99.92%. Unlike existing methods, the proposed method improves detection performance under small-QRS, wide-QRS complexes and noisy conditions without using the searchback algorithms.