Fully Adaptive Denoising of ECG Signals Using Empirical Mode Decomposition with the Modified Indirect Subtraction and the Adaptive Window Techniques

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the major methods for the diagnosis of heart malfunctions. ECG signals are susceptible to both high-frequency and low-frequency noises such as electromyography (EMG), power line interference (PLI) and baseline wander noises, respectively. These noises deteriorate the quality of ECG signals and challenge the proper identification of heart illnesses. In this article, we report an improved fully adaptive method for canceling high-frequency noises using the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) with the modified indirect subtraction and adaptive window techniques. As high-frequency noises are approximately of zero mean and lower-order intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) contain high-frequency noises, a statistical test is performed to determine whether a particular combination of IMFs has zero mean. First, to remove the PLI noise, the modified indirect subtraction technique is used. The sum of IMFs which are dominated by the noise is passed to a Butterworth band-pass filter, and the resultant filtered signal is subtracted directly from the noisy ECG signal. Then, the EMG noise is removed by an improved adaptive window-based noise reduction technique. By exploiting this technique, in contrast to common EMD-based methods, the duration of the QRS complex is computed regarding the location of the peak of the R wave and the widest possible QRS complex which makes the proposed technique applicable to all types of ECG signals. The quantitative results of simulations performed on several records from the MIT–BIH arrhythmia database prove the better performance of the proposed method than the compared methods at different noise levels.