Synchrosqueezing Transform Based Powerline Interference Reduction in ECG Recording

This paper presents an adaptive ECG enhancement procedure based on Synchrosqueezing Transform (SST) to eliminate Powerline interference (PLI) from ECG signal. This work also incorporates the principles of modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) and wiener filter. PLI is a major source of artifacts in the ECG signal which can affect its interpretation. Separating PLI from ECG signal poses a great challenge in the ECG analysis. The existing PLI removal techniques suffer from two major drawbacks such as Mode Mixing, inability to deal with non-stationary characteristics of signal. In this paper, we propose SST based wiener filtering approaches which can overcome the limitation of existing PLI suppression techniques. The proposed approaches undergo three stages of operation: mode decomposition, mode determination and peak restoration to filter out PLI from ECG recording. The mode decomposition uses SST to decompose the corrupted ECG signal into a sum of well separated intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The objective is to filter out PLI from these IMFs. To do so, mode determination step which is based on Kurtosis and Crest factor is applied to categorize decomposition result into groups such as signal mode and noisy mode. Direct subtraction of the noisy mode from the corrupted ECG observation results in ECG signal with reduced peak since noise mode carries part of signal components in addition to interference. Hence, to restore the peak, wiener filter is applied on noisy mode to estimate actual PLI component. Finally, Noise free ECG signal is reconstructed by subtracting estimated PLI from the corrupted ECG signal. This paper discusses four possible PLI suppression methods which are derived by combining SST domain with wiener filter in various ways. Simulations are carried out to test the effectiveness of proposed methods. It is evident from the simulation results that the proposed methods can remove PLI of 50 Hz and its harmonics. The proposed techniques effectively removed PLI in both real and artificial ECG signals and to test its performance they are compared with state of the art methods. The SST based filtering methods outperformed other methods under the condition of PLI frequency variations. The experimental results also suggest that the SST based wiener filtering with modified reference approach offers better PLI suppression than all other methods.

Time-Varying IIR Notch Filter with Reduced Transient Response Based on the Bézier Curve Pole Radius Variability

In this paper a concept of the second order digital infinite impulse response narrow band-reject filter with reduced transient response is proposed. In order to suppress the transient response of the considered infinite impulse response (IIR) notch filter its pole radius is temporarily varied in time using the Bézier parametric curve. Computer simulations verifying the effectiveness of the proposed pole-radius-varying notch filter are presented and compared to the performance of the traditional time-invariant filter using ECG signals distorted by unwanted powerline interference.