QRS detection using adaptive filters: A comparative study

Uncertainties in the Analysis of Heart Rate Variability: A Systematic Review

Heart rate variability (HRV) is an important metric with a variety of applications in clinical situations such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, and mental health. HRV data can be potentially obtained from electrocardiography and photoplethysmography signals, then computational techniques such as signal filtering and data segmentation are used to process the sampled data for calculating HRV measures. However, uncertainties arising from data acquisition, computational models, and physiological factors can lead to degraded signal quality and affect HRV analysis. Therefore, it is crucial to address these uncertainties and develop advanced models for HRV analysis. Although several reviews of HRV analysis exist, they primarily focus on clinical applications, trends in HRV methods, or specific aspects of uncertainties such as measurement noise. This paper provides a comprehensive review of uncertainties in HRV analysis, quantifies their impacts, and outlines potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that presents a holistic review of uncertainties in HRV methods and quantifies their impacts on HRV measures from an engineer's perspective. This review is essential for developing robust and reliable models, and could serve as a valuable future reference in the field, particularly for dealing with uncertainties in HRV analysis.

Robust algorithm for the detection and classification of QRS complexes with different morphologies using the continuous spline wavelet transform with automatic scale detection

This work presents an algorithm for the detection and classification of QRS complexes based on the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) with splines. This approach can evaluate the CWT at any integer scale and the analysis is not restricted to powers of two. The QRS detector comprises four stages: implementation of CWT with splines, detection of QRS complexes, searching for undetected QRS complexes, and correction of the R wave peak location in detected QRS complexes. After, the onsets and ends of the QRS complexes are detected. The algorithm was evaluated with synthetic ECG and with the manually annotated databases: MIT-BIH Arrhythmia, European ST-T, QT and PTB Diagnostic ECG. Evaluation results of the QRS detector were: MIT-BIH arrhythmia database (109,447 beats analyzed), sensitivity Se = 99.72% and positive predictivity P+ = 99.87%; European ST-T database (790522 beats analyzed), Se = 99.92% and P+ = 99.55% and QT database (86498 beats analyzed), Se = 99.97% and P+ = 99.99%. To evaluate the delineation algorithm of the QRS onset (Qi) and QRS end (J) with the QT and PTB Diagnostic ECG databases, the mean and standard deviations of the differences between the automatic and manual annotated location of these points were calculated. The standard deviations were close to the accepted tolerances for deviations determined by the CSE experts. The proposed algorithm is robust to noise, artifacts and baseline drifts, classifies QRS complexes, automatically selects the CWT scale according to the sampling frequency of the ECG record used, and adapts to changes in the heart rate, amplitude and morphology of QRS complexes.

Improved T-wave detection in electrocardiogram signals based non-stationary wavelet transform and QRS complex cancellation with kurtosis analysis

Objective. The T-wave in electrocardiogram (ECG) signal has the potential to enumerate various cardiac dysfunctions in the cardiovascular system. The primary objective of this research is to develop an efficient method for detecting T-waves in ECG signals, with potential applications in clinical diagnosis and continuous patient monitoring.Approach. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm for T-wave peak detection, which relies on a non-decimated stationary wavelet transform method (NSWT) and involves the cancellation of the QRS complex by utilizing its local extrema. The proposed scheme contains three stages: firstly, the technique is pre-processed using a two-stage median filter and Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter to remove the various artifacts from the ECG signal. Secondly, the NSWT technique is implemented using the bior 4.4 mother wavelet without downsampling, employing 24scale analysis, and involves the cancellation of QRS-complex using its local positions. After that, Sauvola technique is used to estimate the baseline and remove the P-wave peaks to enhance T-peaks for accurate detection in the ECG signal. Additionally, the moving average window and adaptive thresholding are employed to enhance and identify the location of the T-wave peaks. Thirdly, false positive T-peaks are corrected using the kurtosis coefficients method.Main results. The robustness and efficiency of the proposed technique have been corroborated by the QT database (QTDB). The results are also validated on a self-recorded database. In QTDB database, the sensitivity of 98.20%, positive predictivity of 99.82%, accuracy of 98.04%, and detection error rate of 1.95% have been achieved. The self-recorded dataset attains a sensitivity, positive predictivity, accuracy, and detection error rate of 99.94%, 99.96%, 99.90%, and 0.09% respectively.Significance. A T-wave peak detection based on NSWT and QRS complex cancellation, along with kurtosis analysis technique, demonstrates superior performance and enhanced detection accuracy compared to state-of-the-art techniques.

Electrocardiogram signal compression using adaptive tunable-Q wavelet transform and modified dead-zone quantizer

The electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are commonly used to identify heart complications. These recordings generate large data that needed to be stored or transferred in telemedicine applications, which require more storage space and bandwidth. Therefore, a strong motivation is present to develop efficient compression algorithms for ECG signals. In the above context, this work proposes a novel compression algorithm using adaptive tunable-Q wavelet transform (TQWT) and modified dead-zone quantizer (DZQ). The parameters of TQWT and threshold values of DZQ are selected using the proposed Sparse-grey wolf optimization (Sparse-GWO) algorithm. The Sparse-GWO is proposed in this work to reduce the computation time of the original GWO. Moreover, it is also compared with some popular algorithms such as original GWO, particle swarm optimization (PSO), Hybrid PSOGWO, and Sparse-PSO. The DZQ has been utilized to perform thresholding and quantization. Then, run-length encoding (RLE) has been used to encode the quantized coefficients. The proposed work has been performed on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Quality assessment performed on reconstructed signals ensure the minimal impact of compression on the morphology of reconstructed ECG signals. The compression performance of proposed algorithm is measured in terms of the following evaluation matrices: percent root-mean-square difference (PRD1), compression ratio (CR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and quality score (QS1). The obtained average values are 3.21%, 20.56, 30.62 dB, and 7.79, respectively.

QRS complex detection using stationary wavelet transform and adaptive thresholding

Purpose- Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is a record of the electrical activity of the heart and contains important clinical data about cardiovascular-related misfunctioning. The goal of the present work is to develop an improved QRS detection algorithm for the detection of heart abnormalities. Methods- In this present work stationary wavelet transforms (SWT) based method has been proposed for precise detection of QRS complex with 'sym2' mother wavelet. The stationary wavelet transform is a systematic mathematical tool to decompose the signal without downsampling using scale analysis and provides high detection of QRS complex and accurate localization of signal components. In the proposed method four level of decomposition is applied and the initial thresholding value is computed by the maximum amplitude of scale one at level four in SWT coefficients without the zero-crossing amplitude detection method. The multi-layered dynamic thresholding method has been applied to detect the true R-peak values and locate the QRS complex in the ECG signal. Results- For evaluation of results, the presented methodology is assessed on MIT-BIH, QTDB, and Noise stress test databases. In MIT-BIH, the sensitivity = 99.88%, positive predictivity = 99.93%, accuracy = 99.80% and detection error rate = 0.18% is achieved. In NSTD database, sensitivity = 97.46%, positive predictivity = 94.20%, accuracy = 91.95% and detection error rate = 8.47% and in QTDB, sensitivity = 99.95%, positive predictivity = 99.90%, accuracy = 99.71% and detection error rate = 0.16% is executed. Conclusion- In the presented proposed methodology, the computation complexity is low and exhibits a simple technique rather than an empirical approach. The proposed technique corroborates the performance for the detection of QRS complex with improved accuracy.

Electrocardiogram Fiducial Point Detector Using a Bilateral Filter and Symmetrical Point-Filter Structure

The characteristics or aspects of important fiducial points (FPs) in the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal are complicated because of various factors, such as non-stationary effects and low signal-to-noise ratio. Due to the various noises caused by the ECG signal measurement environment and by typical ECG signal deformation due to heart diseases, detecting such FPs becomes a challenging task. In this study, we introduce a novel PQRST complex detector using a one-dimensional bilateral filter (1DBF) and the temporal characteristics of FPs. The 1DBF with noise suppression and edge preservation preserves the P- or T-wave whereas it suppresses the QRS-interval. The 1DBF acts as a background predictor for predicting the background corresponding to the P- and T-waves and the remaining flat interval excluding the QRS-interval. The R-peak and QRS-interval are founded by the difference of the original ECG signal and the predicted background signal. Then, the Q- and S-points and the FPs related to the P- and T-wave are sequentially detected using the determined searching range and detection order based on the detected R-peak. The detection performance of the proposed method is analyzed through the MIT-BIH database (MIT-DB) and the QT database (QT-DB).

Design of Atangana-Baleanu-Caputo fractional-order digital filter

Atangana-Baleanu-Caputo (ABC) fractional differential operator based upon Mittag-Leffler kernel exhibits all the advantages of conventional Riemann-Liouville and Caputo fractional differential operators; in addition, the kernel associated is non-singular. Therefore, this paper puts forward a closed-form analytical formulation for the design of an ABC-based fractional-order FIR filter for various signal processing and filtering applications. The closed-form expression is derived by utilizing backward finite difference method and fractional sample delay interpolation techniques. Furthermore, several design examples are considered to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. From the analytical and simulation studies done, it is observed that the proposed design efficiently approximates the ideal frequency response of ABC-fractional differential operator. Finally, one-dimensional and two-dimensional applications of the proposed method are validated and compared against state-of-the-art methods for electrocardiogram (ECG) R-peak detection as well as for digital image sharpening.

Exploratory data analysis based efficient QRS-complex detection technique with minimal computational load

Detection of QRS-complex in the electrocardiogram (ECG) plays a decisive role in cardiac disorder detection. We face many challenges in terms of powerline interference, baseline drift, and abnormal varying peaks. In this work, we propose an exploratory data analysis (EDA) based efficient QRS-complex detection technique with minimal computational load. This paper includes median and moving average filter for pre-processing of the ECG. The peak of filtered ECG is enhanced to third power of the signal. The root mean square (rms) of the signal is estimated for the decision making rule. This technique adapted the new concept for isoelectric line identification and EDA based QRS-complex detection. In this paper, total 10,70,981 beats were used for validation from MIT BIH-Arrhythmia Database (MIT-BIH), Fantasia Database (FDB), European ST-T database (ESTD), a self recorded dataset (SDB), and fetal ECG database (FTDB). Overall sensitivity of 99.65 % and positive predictivity rate of 99.84 % have been achieved. The proposed technique doesn't require selection, setting, and training for QRS-complex detection. Thus, this paper presents a QRS-complex detection technique based on simple decision rules.

Adaptive Cuckoo Search based optimal bilateral filtering for denoising of satellite images

A satellite image transmitted from satellite to the ground station is corrupted by different kinds of noises such as impulse noise, speckle noise and Gaussian noise. The traditional methods of denoising can remove the noise components but cannot preserve the quality of the image and lead to over-blurring of the edges in the image. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper develops an optimized bilateral filter for image denoising and preserving the edges using different nature inspired optimization algorithms which can effectively denoise the image without blurring the edges in the image. Denoising the image using a bilateral filter requires the decision of the control parameters so that the noise is removed and the edge details are preserved. With the help of optimization algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Cuckoo Search (CS) and Adaptive Cuckoo Search (ACS), the control parameters in the bilateral filter are decided for optimal performance. It is observed that the proposed Adaptive Cuckoo Search based bilateral filter denoising gives better results in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), Feature Similarity Index (FSIM), Entropy and CPU time in comparison to traditional methods such as Median filter and RGB spatial filter.

Automatic digital ECG signal extraction and normal QRS recognition from real scene ECG images

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most important tools for assessing cardiac function and detecting potential heart problems. However, most of the current ECG report records remain on the paper, which makes it difficult to preserve and analyze the data. Moreover, paper records could result in the loss significant data, which brings inconvenience to the subsequent clinical diagnosis or artificial intelligence-assisted heart health diagnosis. Taking digital pictures is an intuitive way of preserving these files and can be done simply using smartphones or any other devices with cameras. However, these real scene ECG images often have some image noise that hinders signal extraction. How to eliminate image noise and extract ECG binary image automatically from the noisy and low-quality real scene images of ECG reports is the first problem to be solved in this paper. Next, QRS recognition is implemented on the extracted binary images to determine key points of ECG signals. 1D digital ECG signal is also extracted for accessing the exact values of the extracted points. In light of these tasks, an automatic digital ECG signal extraction and normal QRS recognition from real scene ECG images is proposed in this paper.

METHODS

The normal QRS recognition approach for real scene ECG images in this paper consists of two steps: ECG binary image extraction from ECG images using a new two-layer hierarchical method, and the subsequent QRS recognition based on a novel feature-fusing method. ECG binary image extraction is implemented using sub-channel filters followed by an adaptive filtering algorithm. According to the ratio between pixel and real value of ECG binary image, 1D digital ECG signal is obtained. The normal QRS recognition includes three main steps: establishment of candidate point sets, feature fusion extraction, and QRS recognition. Two datasets are introduced for evaluation including a real scene ECG images dataset and the public Non-Invasive Fetal Electrocardiogram Database (FECG).

RESULTS

Through the experiment on real scene ECG image, the F₁ score for Q, R, S detection is 0.841, 0.992, and 0.891, respectively. The evaluation on the public FECG dataset also proves the robustness of our algorithm, where F₁ score for R is 0.992 (0.996 for thoracic lead) and 0.988 for thoracic S wave.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed method in this article is a promising tool for automatically extracting digital ECG signals and detecting QRS complex in real scene ECG images with normal QRS.

Automatic detection of arrhythmia from imbalanced ECG database using CNN model with SMOTE

Timely prediction of cardiovascular diseases with the help of a computer-aided diagnosis system minimizes the mortality rate of cardiac disease patients. Cardiac arrhythmia detection is one of the most challenging tasks, because the variations of electrocardiogram(ECG) signal are very small, which cannot be detected by human eyes. In this study, an 11-layer deep convolutional neural network model is proposed for classification of the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database into five classes according to the ANSI-AAMI standards. In this CNN model, we designed a complete end-to-end structure of the classification method and applied without the denoising process of the database. The major advantage of the new methodology proposed is that the number of classifications will reduce and also the need to detect, and segment the QRS complexes, obviated. This MIT-BIH database has been artificially oversampled to handle the minority classes, class imbalance problem using SMOTE technique. This new CNN model was trained on the augmented ECG database and tested on the real dataset. The experimental results portray that the developed CNN model has better performance in terms of precision, recall, F-score, and overall accuracy as compared to the work mentioned in the literatures. These results also indicate that the best performance accuracy of 98.30% is obtained in the 70:30 train-test data set.

Hernández A. Robust, real-time generic detector based on a multi-feature probabilistic method

Robust, real-time event detection from physiological signals acquired during long-term ambulatory monitoring still represents a major challenge for highly-artifacted signals. In this paper, we propose an original and generic multi-feature probabilistic detector (MFPD) and apply it to real-time QRS complex detection under noisy conditions. The MFPD method calculates a binary Bayesian probability for each derived feature and makes a centralized fusion, using the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The method is evaluated on two ECG databases: 1) the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database from Physionet containing clean ECG signals, 2) a benchmark noisy database created by adding noise recordings of the MIT-BIH noise stress test database, also from Physionet, to the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Results are compared with a well-known wavelet-based detector, and two recently published detectors: one based on spatiotemporal characteristic of the QRS complex and the second, as the MFDP, based on feature calculations from the University of New South Wales detector (UNSW). For both benchmark Physionet databases, the proposed MFPD method achieves the lowest standard deviation in sensitivity and positive predictivity (+P) despite its online algorithm architecture. While the statistics are comparable for low-to mildly artifactual ECG signals, the MFPD outperforms reference methods for artifacted ECG with low SNR levels reaching 87.48 ± 14.21% in sensitivity and 89.39 ± 14.67% in +P as compared to 88.30 ± 17.66% and 86.06 ± 19.67% respectively from UNSW, the best performing reference method. With demonstrations on the extensively studied QRS detection problem, we consider that the proposed generic structure of the multi-feature probabilistic detector should offer promising perspectives for long-term monitoring applications for highly-artifacted signals.

Design of high performance QRS complex detector for wearable healthcare devices using biorthogonal spline wavelet transform

A high performance QRS complex detector applicable for wearable healthcare devices is proposed in the present work. Since, higher SNR results in better detection accuracy and lesser number of coefficients reduces the hardware resources as well as power dissipation during on chip implementation. Biorthogonal spline wavelet transform is chosen for the proposed detector as it has high signal to noise ratio (SNR) and uses only four coefficients for decomposition. In the proposed approach, a Biorthogonal wavelet filter bank with fourth level decomposition is first used to separate the different frequency components and then a fourth level wavelet filter bank is used to get the denoised electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Wavelet filter bank outputs are multiplied and soft threshold method is applied to get the QRS complex peaks by the QRS complex peak detector block. Add and shift multiplier used in the earlier designs has been replaced by a Booth multiplier in our approach to achieve the higher performance. Booth multiplier and QRS complex peak detector blocks have been designed for low hardware complexity, high performance and accurate detection of the QRS complex peaks. Time interval between the consecutive QRS peaks is calculated using the R-R peak time calculator block and the heart rate (HR) by the HR calculator block. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and arrhythmia are detected based on these heart rate calculations. Proposed design has been tested for its robustness on multiple datasets (namely, MIT-BIH arrhythmia, MIT-BIH noise stress test, and MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation databases). Sensitivity of 99.31%, positive predictivity of 99.19% and the Detection Error Rate (DER) of 1.49% shown by the proposed design makes it preferable for QRS complex detectors used in wearable healthcare devices.

Design of wavelet transform based electrocardiogram monitoring system

The new age advancements in information technology due to materials and integrated circuit (IC) technologies and their applications in biomedical sciences have made the healthcare facilities more compact and affordable for the aging population. Market trends in healthcare and related devices indicate a sharp rise in their demand. Hence the researchers have converged the efforts on designing more smart and advanced medical devices using IC technology. Among these devices, cardiac pacemakers have become a recurrent biomedical device which is engrafted in the human body to detect and monitor a person's heart beating rate. The data thus generated is processed for various medical usages and devices via wireless methods. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) or diseases related to the heart are due to abnormalities or disorders of the heart and blood vessels. Till date, limited literature is available which focuses on a single technique that can perform all of the ECG signal denoising, ECG detection, lossless data compression and wireless transmission. In this work, a joint approach for denoising, detection, compression, and wireless transmission of ECG signal is proposed. The modified biorthogonal wavelet transform is used for denoising, detection and lossless compression of ECG signal. To reduce the circuit complexity, biorthogonal wavelet transform is realized using linear phase structure. Further, it is found in this work that the usage of modified biorthogonal wavelet transform increases the detection accuracy and CR of the proposed design. Also, in this work, the Wi-Fi-based wireless protocol is used for compressed data transmission. The proposed ECG detector achieves the highest sensitivity and positive predictivity of 99.95% and 99.92%, respectively, with the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The use of modified biorthogonal 3.1 wavelet transform and run-length encoding (RLE) for the compression of ECG data achieves a higher compression ratio (CR) of 6.271. To justify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which uses modified biorthogonal wavelet 3.1transform, the results are compared with the existing methods, namely, Huffman coding/simple predictor, Huffman coding/adaptive, and slope predictor/fixed length packaging.

Heart rate monitoring and therapeutic devices: A wavelet transform based approach for the modeling and classification of congestive heart failure

Heart rate monitoring and therapeutic devices include real-time sensing capabilities reflecting the state of the heart. Current circuitry can be interpreted as a cardiac electrical signal compression algorithm representing the time signal information into a single event description of the cardiac activity. It is observed that some detection techniques developed for ECG signal detection like artificial neural network, genetic algorithm, Hilbert transform, hidden Markov model are some sophisticated algorithms which provide suitable results but their implementation on a silicon chip is very complicated. Due to less complexity and high performance, wavelet transform based approaches are widely used. In this paper, after a thorough analysis of various wavelet transforms, it is found that Biorthogonal wavelet transform is best suited to detect ECG signal's QRS complex. The main steps involved in ECG detection process consist of de-noising and locating different ECG peaks using adaptive slope prediction thresholding. Furthermore, the significant challenges involved in the wireless transmission of ECG data are data conversion and power consumption. As medical regulatory boards demand a lossless compression technique, lossless compression technique with a high bit compression ratio is highly required. Furthermore, in this work, LZMA based ECG data compression technique is proposed. The proposed methodology achieves the highest signal to noise ratio, and lowest root mean square error. Also, the proposed ECG detection technique is capable of distinguishing accurately between healthy, myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure and coronary artery disease patients with a detection accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and error of 99.92%, 99.94%, 99.92% and 0.0013, respectively. The use of LZMA data compression of ECG data achieves a high compression ratio of 18.84. The advantages and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are verified by comparing with the existing methods.

Unsupervised heart-rate estimation in wearables with Liquid states and a probabilistic readout

Heart-rate estimation is a fundamental feature of modern wearable devices. In this paper we propose a machine learning technique to estimate heart-rate from electrocardiogram (ECG) data collected using wearable devices. The novelty of our approach lies in (1) encoding spatio-temporal properties of ECG signals directly into spike train and using this to excite recurrently connected spiking neurons in a Liquid State Machine computation model; (2) a novel learning algorithm; and (3) an intelligently designed unsupervised readout based on Fuzzy c-Means clustering of spike responses from a subset of neurons (Liquid states), selected using particle swarm optimization. Our approach differs from existing works by learning directly from ECG signals (allowing personalization), without requiring costly data annotations. Additionally, our approach can be easily implemented on state-of-the-art spiking-based neuromorphic systems, offering high accuracy, yet significantly low energy footprint, leading to an extended battery-life of wearable devices. We validated our approach with CARLsim, a GPU accelerated spiking neural network simulator modeling Izhikevich spiking neurons with Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) and homeostatic scaling. A range of subjects is considered from in-house clinical trials and public ECG databases. Results show high accuracy and low energy footprint in heart-rate estimation across subjects with and without cardiac irregularities, signifying the strong potential of this approach to be integrated in future wearable devices.

A QRS Detection and R Point Recognition Method for Wearable Single-Lead ECG Devices

In the new-generation wearable Electrocardiogram (ECG) system, signal processing with low power consumption is required to transmit data when detecting dangerous rhythms and to record signals when detecting abnormal rhythms. The QRS complex is a combination of three of the graphic deflection seen on a typical ECG. This study proposes a real-time QRS detection and R point recognition method with low computational complexity while maintaining a high accuracy. The enhancement of QRS segments and restraining of P and T waves are carried out by the proposed ECG signal transformation, which also leads to the elimination of baseline wandering. In this study, the QRS fiducial point is determined based on the detected crests and troughs of the transformed signal. Subsequently, the R point can be recognized based on four QRS waveform templates and preliminary heart rhythm classification can be also achieved at the same time. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated using the benchmark of the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database, where the QRS detected sensitivity (Se) and positive prediction (+P) are 99.82% and 99.81%, respectively. The result reveals the approach’s advantage of low computational complexity, as well as the feasibility of the real-time application on a mobile phone and an embedded system.