Designing an Optimum and Reduced Order Filter for Efficient ECG QRS Peak Detection and Classification of Arrhythmia Data

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is commonly used biological signals that show an important role in cardiac analysis. The interpretation and acquisition of QRS complex are significant measures of ECG data dispensation. The R wave has a vital character in the analysis of cardiac rhythm irregularities as well as in the determination of heart rate variability (HRV). This manuscript is proposed to design a new artificial-intelligence-based approach of QRS peak detection and classification of the ECG data. The design of reduced order IIR filter is proposed for the low pass smoothening of the ECG signal data. The min-max optimization is used for optimizing the filter coefficient to design the reduced order filter. In this research paper, elimination of baseline wondering and the power line interferences from the ECG signal is of main attention. The result presented that the accuracy is increased by around 13% over the basic Pan–Tompkins method and around 8% over the existing FIR-filter-based classification rules.

A Multi-Frequency Focused Impedance Measurement System Based on Analogue Synchronous Peak Detection

Monitoring of anatomical structures and physiological processes by electrical impedance has attracted scientists as it is noninvasive, nonionizing and the instrumentation is relatively simple. Focused Impedance Method (FIM) is attractive in this context, as it has enhanced sensitivity at the central region directly beneath the electrode configuration minimizing contribution from neighboring regions. FIM essentially adds or averages two concentric and orthogonal combinations of conventional Tetrapolar Impedance Measurements (TPIM) and has three versions with 4, 6, and 8 electrodes. This paper describes the design and testing of a multi-frequency FIM (MFFIM) system capable of measuring all three versions of FIM at 8 frequencies in the range 10 kHz—1 MHz. A microcontroller based multi-frequency signal generator and a balanced Howland current source with high output impedance (476 kΩ at 10 kHz and 58.3 kΩ at 1 MHz) were implemented for driving currents into biological tissues with an error <1%. The measurements were carried out at each frequency sequentially. The peak values of the amplified voltage signals were measured using a novel analogue synchronous peak detection technique from which the transfer impedances were obtained. The developed system was tested using TPIM measurements on a passive RC Cole network placed between two RC networks, the latter representing skin-electrode contact impedances. Overall accuracy of the measurement was very good (error <4% at all frequencies except 1 MHz, with error 6%) and the resolution was 0.1 Ω. The designed MFFIM system had a sampling rate of >45 frames per second which was deemed adequate for noninvasive real-time impedance measurements on biological tissues.

Robust PPG Peak Detection Using Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks

<div>Accurate peak determination from noise-corrupted photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal is the basis for further analysis of physiological quantities such as heart rate and heart rate variability. In the past decades, many methods have been proposed to provide reliable peak detection. These peak detection methods include rule-based algorithms, adaptive thresholds, and signal processing techniques. However, they are designed for noise-free PPG signals and are insufficient for PPG signals with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This paper focuses on enhancing PPG noise-resiliency and proposes a robust peak detection algorithm for noise and motion artifact corrupted PPG signals. Our algorithm is based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with dilated convolutions. Using dilated convolutions provides a large receptive field, making our CNN model robust at time series processing. In this study, we use a dataset collected from wearable devices in health monitoring under free-living conditions. In addition, a data generator is developed for producing noisy PPG data used for training the network. The method performance is compared against other state-of-the-art methods and tested in SNRs ranging from 0 to 45 dB. Our method obtains better accuracy in all the SNRs, compared with the existing adaptive threshold and transform-based methods. The proposed method shows an overall precision, recall, and F1-score 80%, 80%, and 80% in all the SNR ranges. However, these figures for the other methods are below 78%, 77%, and 77%, respectively. The proposed method proves to be accurate for detecting PPG peaks even in the presence of noise.</div>

Deep Learning Techniques in the Classification of ECG Signals Using R-Peak Detection Based on the PTB-XL Dataset

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, the application of which in electrocardiographic signals is gaining importance. So far, limited studies or optimizations using DNN can be found using ECG databases. To explore and achieve effective ECG recognition, this paper presents a convolutional neural network to perform the encoding of a single QRS complex with the addition of entropy-based features. This study aims to determine what combination of signal information provides the best result for classification purposes. The analyzed information included the raw ECG signal, entropy-based features computed from raw ECG signals, extracted QRS complexes, and entropy-based features computed from extracted QRS complexes. The tests were based on the classification of 2, 5, and 20 classes of heart diseases. The research was carried out on the data contained in a PTB-XL database. An innovative method of extracting QRS complexes based on the aggregation of results from established algorithms for multi-lead signals using the k-mean method, at the same time, was presented. The obtained results prove that adding entropy-based features and extracted QRS complexes to the raw signal is beneficial. Raw signals with entropy-based features but without extracted QRS complexes performed much worse.