Denoising of ECG Signal for Detection and

Classification of Arrhythmia in On-line Patient

Monitoring

Pratik
Roll No: 14EC291
Supervisor
Dr. Gayadhar Pradhan

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering

National Institute of Technology Patna
August, 2017

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 1 / 31

 Outline

• Introduction
• Challenges in ECG Signal Processing
• Past Research Work
• Current Research Work
• Future Research Work
• Publications
• References

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 Introduction ECG Signal Basics

ECG signal
• The heart is an electrical organ, and its activity can be measured
non-invasively [1].
• ECG signal provides an electrical picture of the heart and information about
different pathological conditions.
• Arrhythmia is any irregular heartbeat.

Figure 2 : Cardiac conduction System

Figure 1 : ECG Signal

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 Introduction Ambulatory ECG Monitoring

Ambulatory ECG

• An ambulatory electrocardiogram (ECG) records the electrical activity of your

heart while you do your usual activities [2].
• Many heart problems are noticeable only during certain activities.
• Because arrhythmias can come and go, it may be hard to record one while
you are in the doctor’s office.

Why it is done
• Look for and record irregular heartbeats that come and go or happen during
certain activities.
• Find out what is causing chest pain or pressure, dizziness, or fainting. These
may be symptoms of heart problems.
• Check to see if treatment for an irregular heartbeat is working.

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 Introduction Challenges in ECG signal processing

Challenges in ECG signal processing

• During ECG recording process it gets corrupted by various noise sources [1].
These noise sources distort the morphology of the signal
• For proper Arrhythmia Classification the original signal structure must be
retrieved from the noisy record.
• In case of Ambulatory ECG monitoring the ECG gets corrupted by additive
Gaussian Noise. [3, 4, 5]
• ECG feature Extraction and Feature Selection for Proper Arrhythmia
classification [6, 7, 8]
• Researches going on in Arrhythmia Detection and classification [9, 10, 7, 11]
• ECG beat segmentation is another field to work on. [12, 13]
• Low data rate transmission during wireless ambulatory ECG
monitoring. [14, 15]

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 5 / 31

 Past Research Work

Past Research Work

• ECG denoising Literature survey

• Proposed nonlocal means(NLM) and modified EMD based ECG denoising
technique. It overcomes the individual issues of both the techniques[16].
• Issues in DWT based ECG denoising is overcome using another proposed
technique based on approximation coefficient denoising using NLM
method[17]
• Heartbeat Classification Literature survey.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 6 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising

NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising[16]

• The proposed method which effectively combines the patch-based NLM and
EMD techniques is shown as a block diagram in Figure 4
Recorded ECG
Signal

AWGN
Noise

Modified
Nonlocal Mean
Empirical Mode
Denoising
Decomposition

Soft-Thresholding
IHP for Noise
on 1st Three
Detection
IMF

Optimal Threshold
Denoised Output
condition check

Figure 3 : Block diagram representation of the proposed method for ECG denoising.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 7 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising

NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising[16]

(contd.)
• The modified EMD [18] is used which differs from traditional EMD in process
of Interpolation point calculation

Figure 4 : Illustrating the differences during the calculation of IPs in the standard (left) and the modified EMD (right).

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 8 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising

Experimental Results

1
0 (a)
-1
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
1
0 (b)
-1
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
Amplitude (mv)

1
0 (c)
-1
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
1
0 (d)
-1
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
1
0 (e)
-1
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
1
0 (f)
-1
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
samples

Figure 5 : Denoised output of different denoising algorithm (a) clean ECG signal, (b) noisy ECG signal, (c) Wavelet soft-thresholding, (d) EMD
soft-thresholding, (e) NLM method and (f) proposed method output for a qualitative comparison. For better visualization, 700 samples are taken for this
analysis.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 9 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising

Experimental Results (contd.)

Figure 6 : Comparison of the SNR improvement for the Figure 7 : Comparison of improvement in SNR with
different denoising algorithm studied in this work for varying input SNR levels for the different denoising
various ECG records. methods explored in this study.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 10 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising

Experimental Results (contd.)

Table 1 : The MSE values for the explored approaches and the proposed method with respect to all test
signals at fixed SNR value of 10 dB

ECG Signal Wavelet EMD EMD-Wavelet NLM Proposed

100 0.0011 0.0037 0.0026 0.000552 0.000464
103 0.003 0.0043 0.0029 0.0016 0.0014
104 0.0028 0.0049 0.0036 0.0019 0.0017
105 0.0024 0.0038 0.0031 0.0018 0.0015
106 0.0049 0.0078 0.0012 0.003 0.0026
115 0.003 0.0059 0.0015 0.0030 0.0012
215 0.0018 0.0038 0.0013 0.0029 0.0011

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 11 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising

Experimental Results (contd.)

Figure 8 : Comparison of PRD values for the different

Figure 9 : Comparison of PRD values for the different
denoising algorithms with respect to various ECG
denoising algorithms with varying input SNR levels
records.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 12 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising

Experimental Results (contd.)

Figure 10 : Comparison of MSE values for the different denoising algorithms with varying input
SNR levels.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 13 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques NLM and Modified-EMD based ECG denoising

Conclusion
• The problem of under-averaged samples in the case of NLM-based ECG
denoising is addressed.
• To reduce the computational cost, the modified-EMD (M-EMD) is used in
place of standard EMD method.
• Proposed approach are observed to be much superior to those for the
state-of-the-art methods.
• Technique can be explored for various other kind of noise.
• Improvements are still possible in NLM for over-smoothing problems.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 14 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques Wavelet Decomposition and NLM Filtering based ECG denoising

Effective Wavelet-NLM based ECG Denoising[17]

• A novel method which overcomes various shortcomings of wavelet and NLM
technique.
• The proposed approach is shown in Figure 11

Figure 11 : Flowchart of proposed technique

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 Proposed Denoising Techniques Wavelet Decomposition and NLM Filtering based ECG denoising

Effective Wavelet-NLM based ECG Denoising[17] (contd.)

• The two level frequency decomposition is shown below:

Figure 12 : Frequency range of decomposed coefficients

• The second level approximation coefficient is denoised using NLM technique

• The computational time for NLM technique is reduced due to under-sampled
approximation coefficients.
• Less number of decomposition is needed in wavelet domain.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 16 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques Wavelet Decomposition and NLM Filtering based ECG denoising

Experimental Results
The result for SNR improvement , mean square error (MSE) and percent root
Distortion (PRD) is shown in the tables below:

Table 2 : The SNR improvement values of the explored approaches and the proposed method with respect to
all test signals at fixed SNR value of 10 dB

ECG Signal Wavelet EMD NLM NLM-EMD Proposed

100 4.9983 6.4281 7.1258 7.8801 11.84
103 5.6119 7.4109 7.5282 8.3637 12.47
104 4.2258 5.4501 6.6363 6.9344 13.57
105 5.6765 6.3026 6.9901 7.6414 14.38
106 4.7435 6.4025 6.8725 7.5641 12.62
115 4.6057 7.4038 7.5791 8.4575 12.45
215 4.8526 6.1042 6.1167 7.0928 11.21

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 Proposed Denoising Techniques Wavelet Decomposition and NLM Filtering based ECG denoising

Experimental Results (contd.)

Table 3 : The MSE values of the explored approaches and the proposed method with respect to all test
signals at fixed SNR value of 10 dB

ECG Signal Wavelet EMD EMD-Wavelet NLM NLM-EMD Proposed

100 0.0011 0.0037 0.0026 0.000552 0.000464 0.00018
103 0.003 0.0043 0.0029 0.0016 0.0014 0.0005
104 0.0028 0.0049 0.0036 0.0019 0.0017 0.00033
105 0.0024 0.0038 0.0031 0.0018 0.0015 0.00032
106 0.0049 0.0078 0.0012 0.003 0.0026 0.0008
115 0.003 0.0059 0.0015 0.0030 0.0012 0.0004
215 0.0018 0.0038 0.0013 0.0029 0.0011 0.0004

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 18 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques Wavelet Decomposition and NLM Filtering based ECG denoising

Experimental Results (contd.)

Table 4 : The PRD values of the explored approaches and the proposed method with respect to all test
signals at fixed SNR value of 10 dB

ECG Signal Wavelet EMD NLM NLM-EMD Proposed

100 9.2518 15.3745 6.4789 5.94 3.7795588913
103 13.9379 19.5386 10.4144 9.4593 5.914559968
104 14.6279 22.043 11.583 11.3437 4.9943025321
105 12.8256 27.5037 11.0254 10.229 4.7141688685
106 16.373 18.4386 12.8139 11.8332 6.6234382251
115 9.6865 16.0674 6.8786 6.217 3.9363374246
215 15.1986 28.4064 13.1401 11.7434 7.3332650216

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 Proposed Denoising Techniques Wavelet Decomposition and NLM Filtering based ECG denoising

Experimental Results (contd.)

Original ECG
1

-1
0 500 1000 1500 2000
Amplitude (mv)

Noisy ECG
1

-1
0 500 1000 1500 2000
Denoised Output
1

-1
0 500 1000 1500 2000
samples [n]
Figure 13 : Denoising result of Proposed method

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 20 / 31

 Proposed Denoising Techniques Wavelet Decomposition and NLM Filtering based ECG denoising

Conclusion
• overcomes the individual issues of both technique like rare-patch effect in
NLM and large decomposition levels in DWT based denoising methods.
• To reduce the computational cost, the proposed method uses only two level
of DWT based decomposition.
• Proposed approach are observed to be much superior to those for the
state-of-the-art methods.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 21 / 31

 Current Research Work

Current Research Work

• Carrying on the heartbeat classification literature survey.

• Learning WFDB toolkits, PRTools, R, and ECG-kit for building Automatic
heartbeat classification system for Arrhythmia detection.
• Exploring Variational Mode decomposition (VMD) for ECG denoising.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 22 / 31

 Current Research Work Heartbeat Classification literature Survey

Heartbeat Classification literature Survey

Table 5 : Heartbeat Classification

Work Feature Set Classifier

de Chazal et al.[19] ECG-Intervals, Morphological features Weighted LD
Llamedo and Martinez[20] Wavelet, VCG+SFFS Weighted LD
Zhang et al.[21] RR intervals, morphological features, Combined SVM
ECG-intervals and segmentation
Escalona et al.[22] Raw wave Reservoir Computing
Huang et al.[23] Random Projection, RR-intervals Ensemble of SVM
Lin & Yang[24] normalized RR-interval weighted LD
de Lannoy et al.[25] RR-intervals, ECG-segments, Weighted CRF
morphological, HBF, HOS
Ye et al.[26] Morphological, wavelet, RR-interval SVM
ICA, PCA
Bazi et al.[27] Morphological, Wavelet SVM, Logistic Regression

LD, Linear Discriminant; VCG, Vectorcardiogram; SFFS, sequential forward floating search; CRF, conditional random fields; HBF, Hermite Basis Function;

HOS, Higher order Statistics; ICA, Independent Component analysis; PCA, Principal component analysis.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 23 / 31

 Current Research Work Variational Mode Decomposition(VMD)

Variational Mode Decomposition

• Unlike Empirical mode Decomposition, VMD is non-recursive signal

decomposition technique.
• Proposed by Konstantin Dragomiretskiy and Dominique Zosso [28] in order
to overcome the issues of EMD.
• It is proposed only for 1-D signals like Speech and ECG.
• It is much more robust to noise than EMD.
• The decomposition process results in various modes band-limited around their
central frequency.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 24 / 31

 Current Research Work Toolkits

Toolkits

• PRTools is Matlab Pattern Recognition Toolbox for representation and

generalization.
• ecg-kit is specially design toolbox to use several popular algorithms for ECG
processing.
• WFDB software package consists of Software for viewing, analyzing, and
creating recordings of physiologic signals.
• R-language: R is a programming language and software environment for
statistical analysis, graphics representation and reporting.
• Several python machine learning packages for classification.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 25 / 31

 Future Research Work

Future Research Work

• Denoising ECG signal based on Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD).
• Working on PRTools, ecg-kit,R, WFDB toolkits, and python machine
learning packages.
• New feature sets for heartbeat classification system.
• Feature based on Variational mode decomposition for heartbeat classification.
• Building Automatic heartbeat classification system for arrhythmia detection.

Pratik (Dept. of ECE, NITP) Progress Seminar August 18, 2017 26 / 31

 Publications

• Journal Article
• Pratik Singh, Gayadhar Pradhan and S Shahnawazuddin, “Denoising of ECG
signal by non-local estimation of approximation coefficients in DWT.
Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering,” 37(3), pp.599-610, 2017.
• Conference
• Pratik Singh, S Shahnawazuddin, Gayadhar Pradhan, “ SIGNIFICANCE OF
MODIFIED EMPIRICAL MODE DECOMPOSITION FOR ECG DENOISING”,
in IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biological Society (EMBC), IEEE,
2017,July, pp. 2956-2959.
• Ashish Verma, Pratik Singh, Gayadhar Pradhan, “Electrocardiogram denoising
using Wavelet decomposition and EMD domain filtering.” InRegion 10
Conference (TENCON), 2016 IEEE 2016, Nov 22, pp. 2185-2189.
• Journal Communicated
• Pratik Singh, S Shahnawazuddin and Gayadhar Pradhan, “An Efficient ECG
Denoising Technique based on Non-local Means Estimation and Modified
Empirical Mode Decomposition”.(Springer)
• Conference Communicated
• Pratik Singh, Sarmila Garnaik, Gayadhar Pradhan, “Significance of non-local
means estimation in DWT based ECG signal denoising” , TENCON(2017).

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 References

References
[1] G. D. Clifford, F. Azuaje, and P. McSharry, Advanced methods and tools for ECG data analysis. Artech house London, 2006.

[2] A. Alesanco and J. Garcı́a, “Clinical assessment of wireless ECG transmission ı́n real-time cardiac telemonitoring,” IEEE Transactions on Information
Technology in Biomedicine, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 1144–1152, Sept 2010.
[3] D. L. Donoho, “De-noising by soft-thresholding,” IEEE transactions on information theory, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 613–627, 1995.

[4] B. H. Tracey and E. L. Miller, “Nonlocal means denoising of ECG signals,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 59, no. 9, pp.
2383–2386, 2012.
[5] M. A. Kabir and C. Shahnaz, “Denoising of ecg signals based on noise reduction algorithms in emd and wavelet domains,” Biomedical Signal
Processing and Control, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 481–489, 2012.
[6] C. Alexakis, H. Nyongesa, R. Saatchi, N. Harris, C. Davies, C. Emery, R. Ireland, and S. Heller, “Feature extraction and classification of
electrocardiogram (ECG) signals related to hypoglycaemia,” Computers in Cardiology, 2003, pp. 537–540, 2003.

[7] G. Aslantas, F. Gurgen, and A. A. Salah, “GA-NN approach for ECG feature selection in rule based arrhythmia classification,” Neural Network
World, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 267–283, 2014.
[8] S. Shilaskar and A. Ghatol, “Expert Systems with Applications Feature selection for medical diagnosis : Evaluation for cardiovascular diseases,”
Expert Systems With Applications, vol. 40, no. 10, pp. 4146–4153, 2013. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.01.032

[9] E. José, S. Luz, W. Robson, G. Cámara-chávez, and D. Menotti, “ECG-based heartbeat classification for arrhythmia detection : A survey,”
Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, vol. 127, pp. 144–164, 2015. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpb.2015.12.008

[10] J.-S. Wang, W.-C. Chiang, Y.-L. Hsu, and Y.-T. C. Yang, “ECG arrhythmia classification using a probabilistic neural network with a feature reduction
method,” Neurocomputing, vol. 116, pp. 38–45, 2013. [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925231212006960

[11] G. K. Prasad and J. S. Sahambi, “ECG Arrhythmias using Multi-Resolution Analysis and Neural Networks,” TENCON 2003. Conference on
Convergent Technologies for Asia-Pacific Region, no. 3, pp. 227 – 231, 2003. [Online]. Available:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs{ }all.jsp?arnumber=1273320{&}tag=1

[12] R. V. Andreão and J. Boudy, “Combining Wavelet Transform and Hidden Markov Models for ECG Segmentation,” EURASIP Journal on Advances in
Signal Processing, vol. 2007, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2007. [Online]. Available: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asp/2007/056215.abs.html

[13] S. Kurtek and W. Wu, “Segmentation, alignment and statistical analysis of biosignals with application to disease classification,” Journal of Applied
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 References

References (contd.)
[14] H. Kim, R. F. Yazicioglu, P. Merken, C. Van Hoof, and H. J. Yoo, “ECG signal compression and classification algorithm with quad level vector for
ECG holter system,” IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 93–100, 2010.
[15] S. Padhy, L. N. Sharma, and S. Dandapat, “Multilead ECG data compression using SVD in multiresolution domain,” Biomedical Signal Processing
and Control, vol. 23, pp. 10–18, 2016. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bspc.2015.06.012

[16] P. Singh, S. Shahnawazuddin, and G. Pradhan, “Significance of modified empirical mode decomposition for ecg denoising,” in Engineering in
Medicine and Biological Society (EMBC), 39th International Conference. IEEE, 2017, pp. 2956–2959.

[17] P. Singh, G. Pradhan, and S. Shahnawazuddin, “Denoising of ecg signal by non-local estimation of approximation coefficients in dwt,”
Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 599–610, 2017.
[18] R. Sharma and S. M. Prasanna, “A better decomposition of speech obtained using modified empirical mode decomposition,” Digital Signal
Processing, vol. 58, pp. 26 – 39, 2016. [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051200416300975

[19] P. De Chazal, M. O’Dwyer, and R. B. Reilly, “Automatic classification of heartbeats using ecg morphology and heartbeat interval features,” IEEE
Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 51, no. 7, pp. 1196–1206, 2004.
[20] M. Llamedo and J. P. Martı́nez, “Heartbeat classification using feature selection driven by database generalization criteria,” IEEE Transactions on
Biomedical Engineering, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 616–625, 2011.
[21] Z. Zhang, J. Dong, X. Luo, K.-S. Choi, and X. Wu, “Heartbeat classification using disease-specific feature selection,” Computers in biology and
medicine, vol. 46, pp. 79–89, 2014.
[22] M. A. Escalona-Morán, M. C. Soriano, I. Fischer, and C. R. Mirasso, “Electrocardiogram classification using reservoir computing with logistic
regression,” IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 892–898, 2015.
[23] H. Huang, J. Liu, Q. Zhu, R. Wang, and G. Hu, “A new hierarchical method for inter-patient heartbeat classification using random projections and rr
intervals,” Biomedical engineering online, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 90, 2014.
[24] C.-C. Lin and C.-M. Yang, “Heartbeat classification using normalized rr intervals and morphological features,” Mathematical Problems in
Engineering, vol. 2014, 2014.
[25] G. De Lannoy, D. François, J. Delbeke, and M. Verleysen, “Weighted svms and feature relevance assessment in supervised heart beat classification,”
in International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies. Springer, 2010, pp. 212–223.

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 References

References (contd.)
[26] C. Ye, B. V. Kumar, and M. T. Coimbra, “Combining general multi-class and specific two-class classifiers for improved customized ecg heartbeat
classification,” in Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2012 21st International Conference on. IEEE, 2012, pp. 2428–2431.

[27] Y. Bazi, N. Alajlan, H. AlHichri, and S. Malek, “Domain adaptation methods for ecg classification,” in Computer Medical Applications (ICCMA),
2013 International Conference on. IEEE, 2013, pp. 1–4.
[28] K. Dragomiretskiy and D. Zosso, “Variational mode decomposition,” IEEE transactions on signal processing, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 531–544, 2014.

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 References

Thank you

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