Efficient EEG motion artifact elimination framework for ambulatory epileptic seizure detection application

Motion artifacts are a pervasive challenge in EEG ambulatory monitoring, often obscuring critical neurological signals and impeding accurate seizure detection. In this study, we propose a new approach of outlier based grouping of two level Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) decomposition combined with Relative Total Variation (RTV) filter for the effective removal of motion-induced noise from ambulatory EEG data. A two-stage SSA method was employed to decompose single-channel EEG signal, which had been interfered with, into various fre quency bands. The affected sub-band signal was then subjected to an RTV filter to estimate the artifact signal. Subtracting this estimated artifact signal from the contaminated sub-band signal yielded the filtered sub-band signal. Subse quently, the filtered sub-band signal was reintegrated with the other decomposed components from noise-free bands, culminating in the generation of the ultimate denoised EEG signal. Based on the comprehensive set of simulation results, it can be deduced that the algorithm described in the paper outperforms existing methods. It demonstrates superior metrics evaluation in terms of ΔSNR,η,MAE, andPSNRwhen compared to these alternatives. Our framework sig- nificantly enhances the quality of EEG data by successfully eliminating motion artifacts while preserving crucial brainwave information. To evaluate the prac tical impact of this noise reduction technique, we assess its performance in the context of seizure detection. The results reveal a substantial improvement in the accuracy and reliability of seizure detection algorithms when applied to EEG data preprocessed with proposed method.

An Internal Defect Detection Algorithm for Concrete Blocks Based on Local Mean Decomposition-Singular Value Decomposition and Weighted Spatial-Spectral Entropy

Within the scope of concrete internal defect detection via laser Doppler vibrometry (LDV), the acquired signals frequently suffer from low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) due to the heterogeneity of the concrete's material properties and its rough surface structure. Consequently, these factors make the defect signal characteristics challenging to discern precisely. In response to this challenge, we propose an internal defect detection algorithm that incorporates local mean decomposition-singular value decomposition (LMD-SVD) and weighted spatial-spectral entropy (WSSE). Initially, the LDV vibration signal undergoes denoising via LMD and the SVD algorithms to reduce noise interference. Subsequently, the distribution of each frequency in the scan plane is analyzed utilizing the WSSE algorithm. Since the vibrational energy of the frequencies caused by the defect resonance is concentrated in the defect region, its energy distribution in the scan plane is non-uniform, resulting in a significant difference between the defect resonance frequencies' SSE values and the other frequencies' SSE values. This feature is used to estimate the resonant frequencies of internal defects. Ultimately, the defects are characterized based on the modal vibration patterns of the defect resonant frequencies. Tests were performed on two concrete blocks with simulated cavity defects, using an ultrasonic transducer as the excitation device to generate ultrasonic vibrations directly from the back of the blocks and applying an LDV as the acquisition device to collect vibration signals from their front sides. The results demonstrate the algorithm's capacity to effectively pinpoint the information on the location and shape of shallow defects within the concrete, underscoring its practical significance for concrete internal defect detection in practical engineering scenarios.

Deep Learning-based Protoacoustic Signal Denoising for Proton Range Verification

Proton therapy is a type of radiation therapy that can provide better dose distribution compared to photon therapy by delivering most of the energy at the end of range, which is called the Bragg peak (BP). The protoacoustic technique was developed to determine the BP locations in vivo, but it requires a large dose delivery to the tissue to obtain a high number of signal averaging (NSA) to achieve a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which is not suitable for clinical use. A novel deep learning-based technique has been proposed to denoise acoustic signals and reduce BP range uncertainty with much lower doses. Three accelerometers were placed on the distal surface of a cylindrical polyethylene (PE) phantom to collect protoacoustic signals. In total, 512 raw signals were collected at each device. Device-specific stack autoencoder (SAE) denoising models were trained to denoise the noise-containing input signals, which were generated by averaging only 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 24 raw signals(low NSA signals), while the cleansignals were obtained by averaging 192 raw signals (high NSA). Both supervised and unsupervised training strategies were employed, and the evaluation of the models was based on mean squared error (MSE), SNR, and BP range uncertainty. Overall, the supervised SAEs outperformed the unsupervised SAEs in BP range verification. For the high accuracy detector, it achieved a BP range uncertainty of 0.20 ± 3.44 mm by averaging over 8 raw signals, while for the other two low accuracy detectors, they achieved the BP uncertainty of 1.44 ± 6.45 mm and -0.23 ± 4.88 mm by averaging 16 raw signals, respectively. This deep learning-based denoising method has shown promising results in enhancing the SNR of protoacoustic measurements and improving the accuracy in BP range verification. It greatly reduces the dose and time for potential clinical applications.&#xD.

Signal denoising through topographic modularity of neural circuits

Information from the sensory periphery is conveyed to the cortex via structured projection pathways that spatially segregate stimulus features, providing a robust and efficient encoding strategy. Beyond sensory encoding, this prominent anatomical feature extends throughout the neocortex. However, the extent to which it influences cortical processing is unclear. In this study, we combine cortical circuit modeling with network theory to demonstrate that the sharpness of topographic projections acts as a bifurcation parameter, controlling the macroscopic dynamics and representational precision across a modular network. By shifting the balance of excitation and inhibition, topographic modularity gradually increases task performance and improves the signal-to-noise ratio across the system. We demonstrate that in biologically constrained networks, such a denoising behavior is contingent on recurrent inhibition. We show that this is a robust and generic structural feature that enables a broad range of behaviorally relevant operating regimes, and provide an in-depth theoretical analysis unraveling the dynamical principles underlying the mechanism.

Dual Residual Denoising Autoencoder with Channel Attention Mechanism for Modulation of Signals

Aiming to address the problems of the high bit error rate (BER) of demodulation or low classification accuracy of modulation signals with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), we propose a double-residual denoising autoencoder method with a channel attention mechanism, referred to as DRdA-CA, to improve the SNR of modulation signals. The proposed DRdA-CA consists of an encoding module and a decoding module. A squeeze-and-excitation (SE) ResNet module containing one residual connection is modified and then introduced into the autoencoder as the channel attention mechanism, to better extract the characteristics of the modulation signals and reduce the computational complexity of the model. Moreover, the other residual connection is further added inside the encoding and decoding modules to optimize the network degradation problem, which is beneficial for fully exploiting the multi-level features of modulation signals and improving the reconstruction quality of the signal. The ablation experiments prove that both the improved SE module and dual residual connections in the proposed method play an important role in improving the denoising performance. The subsequent experimental results show that the proposed DRdA-CA significantly improves the SNR values of eight modulation types in the range of -12 dB to 8 dB. Especially for 16QAM and 64QAM, the SNR is improved by 8.38 dB and 8.27 dB on average, respectively. Compared to the DnCNN denoising method, the proposed DRdA-CA makes the average classification accuracy increase by 67.59∼74.94% over the entire SNR range. When it comes to the demodulation, compared with the RLS and the DnCNN denoising algorithms, the proposed denoising method reduces the BER of 16QAM by an average of 63.5% and 40.5%, and reduces the BER of 64QAM by an average of 46.7% and 18.6%. The above results show that the proposed DRdA-CA achieves the optimal noise reduction effect.

[Diagnostic predictive value of liver biopsy for clinical aspects]

Background

The quest for improved diagnosis and treatment in home health care models has led to the development of wearable medical devices for remote vital signs monitoring. An accurate signal and a high diagnostic yield are critical for the cost-effectiveness of wearable health care monitoring systems and their widespread application in resource-constrained environments. Despite technological advances, the information acquired by these devices can be contaminated by motion artifacts (MA) leading to misdiagnosis or repeated procedures with increases in associated costs. This makes it necessary to develop methods to improve the quality of the signal acquired by these devices.

Objective

We aimed to present a novel method for electrocardiogram (ECG) signal denoising to reduce MA. We aimed to analyze the method’s performance and to compare its performance to that of existing approaches.

Methods

We present the novel Redundant denoising Independent Component Analysis method for ECG signal denoising based on the redundant and simultaneous acquisition of ECG signals and movement information, multichannel processing, and performance assessment considering the information contained in the signal waveform. The method is based on data including ECG signals from the patient’s chest and back, the acquisition of triaxial movement signals from inertial measurement units, a reference signal synthesized from an autoregressive model, and the separation of interest and noise sources through multichannel independent component analysis.

Results

The proposed method significantly reduced MA, showing better performance and introducing a smaller distortion in the interest signal compared with other methods. Finally, the performance of the proposed method was compared to that of wavelet shrinkage and wavelet independent component analysis through the assessment of signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic time warping, and a proposed index based on the signal waveform evaluation with an ensemble average ECG.

Conclusions

Our novel ECG denoising method is a contribution to converting wearable devices into medical monitoring tools that can be used to support the remote diagnosis and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. A more accurate signal substantially improves the diagnostic yield of wearable devices. A better yield improves the devices’ cost-effectiveness and contributes to their widespread application.

X-ray Pulsar Signal Denoising Based on Variational Mode Decomposition

Pulsars, especially X-ray pulsars detectable for small-size detectors, are highly accurate natural clocks suggesting potential applications such as interplanetary navigation control. Due to various complex cosmic background noise, the original pulsar signals, namely photon sequences, observed by detectors have low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) that obstruct the practical uses. This paper presents the pulsar denoising strategy developed based on the variational mode decomposition (VMD) approach. It is actually the initial work of our interplanetary navigation control research. The original pulsar signals are decomposed into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) via VMD, by which the Gaussian noise contaminating the pulsar signals can be attenuated because of the filtering effect during signal decomposition and reconstruction. Comparison experiments based on both simulation and HEASARC-archived X-ray pulsar signals are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed pulsar denoising strategy.

Force and vibration analysis in biomechanical preparation of root canals using reciprocating endodontic file system: In vitro study

The shaping and cleaning of the root canal are very important in root canal treatment. The excessive force and vibration during biomechanical preparation of the root canal may result in failure of the endodontic file. In this study, force and vibration analysis was carried out during root canal preparation. The samples of human extracted (premolar) teeth were provided by the College of Dental Science and Hospital. Endodontic instruments for reciprocating motion, such as the WaveOne Gold file system, had been used for root canal preparation. Force and vibration signals were recorded by dynamometer and accelerometer, respectively. The acquired signals were denoised using the db4 (SWT denoising 1-D) wavelet. Four levels of decomposition were carried out for each signal. The signal denoising technique was used to remove unwanted noise from the acquired signal. FESEM analysis was used to visualize the levels of severity of endodontic files during the cleaning and shaping of the root canal. In most of the cases, the failure occurred due to the improper use of the root canal instrumentation. The optimum amount of force was used to avoid the file failure and provided the proper instrumentation. The curve fitting regression model was used to find the interdependency between force and vibration.

EEMD and Multiscale PCA-Based Signal Denoising Method and Its Application to Seismic P-Phase Arrival Picking

Signal denoising is one of the most important issues in signal processing, and various techniques have been proposed to address this issue. A combined method involving wavelet decomposition and multiscale principal component analysis (MSPCA) has been proposed and exhibits a strong signal denoising performance. This technique takes advantage of several signals that have similar noises to conduct denoising; however, noises are usually quite different between signals, and wavelet decomposition has limited adaptive decomposition abilities for complex signals. To address this issue, we propose a signal denoising method based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and MSPCA. The proposed method can conduct MSPCA-based denoising for a single signal compared with the former MSPCA-based denoising methods. The main steps of the proposed denoising method are as follows: First, EEMD is used for adaptive decomposition of a signal, and the variance contribution rate is selected to remove components with high-frequency noises. Subsequently, the Hankel matrix is constructed on each component to obtain a higher order matrix, and the main score and load vectors of the PCA are adopted to denoise the Hankel matrix. Next, the PCA-denoised component is denoised using soft thresholding. Finally, the stacking of PCA- and soft thresholding-denoised components is treated as the final denoised signal. Synthetic tests demonstrate that the EEMD-MSPCA-based method can provide good signal denoising results and is superior to the low-pass filter, wavelet reconstruction, EEMD reconstruction, Hankel–SVD, EEMD-Hankel–SVD, and wavelet-MSPCA-based denoising methods. Moreover, the proposed method in combination with the AIC picking method shows good prospects for processing microseismic waves.

A New Method Based on Time-Varying Filtering Intrinsic Time-Scale Decomposition and General Refined Composite Multiscale Sample Entropy for Rolling-Bearing Feature Extraction

The early fault diagnosis of rolling bearings has always been a difficult problem due to the interference of strong noise. This paper proposes a new method of early fault diagnosis for rolling bearings with entropy participation. First, a new signal decomposition method is proposed in this paper: intrinsic time-scale decomposition based on time-varying filtering. It is introduced into the framework of complete ensemble intrinsic time-scale decomposition with adaptive noise (CEITDAN). Compared with traditional intrinsic time-scale decomposition, intrinsic time-scale decomposition based on time-varying filtering can improve frequency-separation performance. It has strong robustness in the presence of noise interference. However, decomposition parameters (the bandwidth threshold and B-spline order) have significant impacts on the decomposition results of this method, and they need to be artificially set. Aiming to address this problem, this paper proposes rolling-bearing fault diagnosis optimization based on an improved coyote optimization algorithm (COA). First, the minimal generalized refined composite multiscale sample entropy parameter was used as the objective function. Through the improved COA algorithm, optimal intrinsic time-scale decomposition parameters based on time-varying filtering that match the input signal are obtained. By analyzing generalized refined composite multiscale sample entropy (GRCMSE), whether the mode component is dominated by the fault signal is determined. The signal is reconstructed and decomposed again. Finally, the mode component with the highest energy in the central frequency band is selected for envelope spectrum variation for fault diagnosis. Lastly, simulated and experimental signals were used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

An Ultra-Short Baseline Underwater Positioning System with Kalman Filtering

The ultra-short baseline underwater positioning is one of the most widely applied methods in underwater positioning and navigation due to its simplicity, efficiency, low cost, and accuracy. However, there exists environmental noise, which has negative impacts on the positioning accuracy during the ultra-short baseline (USBL) positioning process, which results in a large positioning error. The positioning result may lead to wrong decision-making in the latter processing. So, it is necessary to consider the error sources, and take effective measurements to minimize the negative impact of the noise. In our work, we propose a USBL positioning system with Kalman filtering to improve the positioning accuracy. In this system, we first explore a new kind of element array to accurately capture the acoustic signals from the object. We then organically combine the Kalman filters with the array elements to filter the acoustic signals, using the minimum mean-square error rule to obtain accurate acoustic signals. We got the high-precision phase difference information based on the non-equidistant quaternary original array and the phase difference acquisition mechanism. Finally, on account of the obtained accurate phase difference information and position calculation, we determined the coordinates of the underwater target. Comprehensive evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed USBL positioning method based on the Kalman filter algorithm can effectively enhance the positioning accuracy.

Photoacoustic image improvement based on a combination of sparse coding and filtering

SIGNIFICANCE

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) has been greatly developed in a broad range of diagnostic applications. The efficiency of light to sound conversion in PAI is limited by the ubiquitous noise arising from the tissue background, leading to a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and thus a poor quality of images. Frame averaging has been widely used to reduce the noise; however, it compromises the temporal resolution of PAI.

AIM

We propose an approach for photoacoustic (PA) signal denoising based on a combination of low-pass filtering and sparse coding (LPFSC).

APPROACH

LPFSC method is based on the fact that PA signal can be modeled as the sum of low frequency and sparse components, which allows for the reduction of noise levels using a hybrid alternating direction method of multipliers in an optimization process.

RESULTS

LPFSC method was evaluated using in-silico and experimental phantoms. The results show a 26% improvement in the peak SNR of PA signal compared to the averaging method for in-silico data. On average, LPFSC method offers a 63% improvement in the image contrast-to-noise ratio and a 33% improvement in the structural similarity index compared to the averaging method for objects located at three different depths, ranging from 10 to 20 mm, in a porcine tissue phantom.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed method is an effective tool for PA signal denoising, whereas it ultimately improves the quality of reconstructed images, especially at higher depths, without limiting the image acquisition speed.

A Denoising Method for Fiber Optic Gyroscope Based on Variational Mode Decomposition and Beetle Swarm Antenna Search Algorithm

Fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) is one of the important components of Inertial Navigation Systems (INS). In order to improve the accuracy of the INS, it is necessary to suppress the random error of the FOG signal. In this paper, a variational mode decomposition (VMD) denoising method based on beetle swarm antenna search (BSAS) algorithm is proposed to reduce the noise in FOG signal. Firstly, the BSAS algorithm is introduced in detail. Then, the permutation entropy of the band-limited intrinsic mode functions (BLIMFs) is taken as the optimization index, and two key parameters of VMD algorithm, including decomposition mode number K and quadratic penalty factor α , are optimized by using the BSAS algorithm. Next, a new method based on Hausdorff distance (HD) between the probability density function (PDF) of all BLIMFs and that of the original signal is proposed in this paper to determine the relevant modes. Finally, the selected BLIMF components are reconstructed to get the denoised signal. In addition, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme is better than the existing schemes in terms of noise reduction performance. Two experiments further demonstrate the priority of the proposed scheme in the FOG noise reduction compared with other schemes.

Spectral State Compression of Markov Processes

Model reduction of Markov processes is a basic problem in modeling state-transition systems. Motivated by the state aggregation approach rooted in control theory, we study the statistical state compression of a discrete-state Markov chain from empirical trajectories. Through the lens of spectral decomposition, we study the rank and features of Markov processes, as well as properties like representability, aggregability, and lumpability. We develop spectral methods for estimating the transition matrix of a low-rank Markov model, estimating the leading subspace spanned by Markov features, and recovering latent structures like state aggregation and lumpable partition of the state space. We prove statistical upper bounds for the estimation errors and nearly matching minimax lower bounds. Numerical studies are performed on synthetic data and a dataset of New York City taxi trips.

Detection and classification of ECG noises using decomposition on mixed codebook for quality analysis

In this Letter, a robust technique is presented to detect and classify different electrocardiogram (ECG) noises including baseline wander (BW), muscle artefact (MA), power line interference (PLI) and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) based on signal decomposition on mixed codebooks. These codebooks employ temporal and spectral-bound waveforms which provide sparse representation of ECG signals and can extract ECG local waves as well as ECG noises including BW, PLI, MA and AWGN simultaneously. Further, different statistical approaches and temporal features are applied on decomposed signals for detecting the presence of the above mentioned noises. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed technique are evaluated using a large set of noise-free and noisy ECG signals taken from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Boston's Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database, MIT-BIH polysmnographic database and Fantasia database. It is shown from the results that the proposed technique achieves an average detection accuracy of above 99% in detecting all kinds of ECG noises. Furthermore, average results show that the technique can achieve an average sensitivity of 98.55%, positive productivity of 98.6% and classification accuracy of 97.19% for ECG signals taken from all three databases.

Improved Vancouver Raman Algorithm Based on Empirical Mode Decomposition for Denoising Biological Samples

A novel method based on the Vancouver Raman algorithm (VRA) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) for denoising Raman spectra of biological samples is presented. The VRA is one of the most used methods for denoising Raman spectroscopy and is composed of two main steps: signal filtering and polynomial fitting. However, the signal filtering step consists in a simple mean filter that could eliminate spectrum peaks with small intensities or merge relatively close spectrum peaks into one single peak. Thus, the result is often sensitive to the order of the mean filter, so the user must choose it carefully to obtain the expected result; this introduces subjectivity in the process. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose a new algorithm, namely the modified-VRA (mVRA) with the following improvements: (1) to replace the mean filter step by EMD as an adaptive parameter-free signal processing method; and (2) to automate the selection of polynomial degree. The denoising capabilities of VRA, EMD, and mVRA were compared in Raman spectra of artificial data based on Teflon material, synthetic material obtained from vitamin E and paracetamol, and biological material of human nails and mouse brain. The correlation coefficient (ρ) was used to compare the performance of the methods. For the artificial Raman spectra, the denoised signal obtained by mVRA (ρ>0.91) outperforms VRA (ρ>0.86) for moderate to high noise levels whereas mVRA outperformed EMD (ρ>0.90) for high noise levels. On the other hand, when it comes to modeling the underlying fluorescence signal of the samples (i.e., the baseline trend), the proposed method mVRA showed consistent results (ρ>0.94). For Raman spectra of synthetic material, good performance of the three methods (ρ=0.99 for VRA, ρ=0.93 for EMD, and ρ=0.99 for mVRA) was obtained. Finally, in the biological material, mVRA and VRA showed similar results (ρ=0.96 for VRA, ρ=0.85 for EMD, and ρ=0.91 for mVRA); however, mVRA retains valuable information corresponding to relevant Raman peaks with small amplitude. Thus, the application of EMD as a filter in the VRA method provides a good alternative for denoising biological Raman spectra, since the information of the Raman peaks is conserved and parameter tuning is not required. Simultaneously, EMD allows the baseline correction to be automated.

A Gyroscope Signal Denoising Method Based on Empirical Mode Decomposition and Signal Reconstruction

To suppress the random drift error of a gyroscope signal, this paper proposes a novel denoising method, which is based on processing the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) obtained by empirical mode decomposition (EMD). Considering that a gyroscope signal contains colored noise in addition to Gaussian white noise, fractal Gaussian noise (FGN) was introduced to quantify the noise in the gyroscope data. The proposed denoising method combines the FGN energy model and the modified method of Hausdorff distance (HD) to adaptively divide the IMFs into three categories (pure noise, pure information, and mixed components of noise and information). Then, the information IMFs and the mixed components after thresholding were selected to give the optimal signal reconstruction. Static and dynamic signal tests of the fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) were carried out to illustrate the performance of the proposed method, and compared with other traditional EMD denoising methods, such as the Euclidean norm measure method (EMD-l2-norm) and the sliding average filtering method (EMD-SA). The results of the analysis of both the static and dynamic signal tests indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Signal Denoising Method Using AIC-SVD and Its Application to Micro-Vibration in Reaction Wheels

To suppress noise in signals, a denoising method called AIC-SVD is proposed on the basis of the singular value decomposition (SVD) and the Akaike information criterion (AIC). First, the Hankel matrix is chosen as the trajectory matrix of the signals, and its optimal number of rows and columns is selected according to the maximum energy of the singular values. On the basis of the improved AIC, the valid order of the optimal matrix is determined for the vibration signals mixed with Gaussian white noise and colored noise. Subsequently, the denoised signals are reconstructed by inverse operation of SVD and the averaging method. To verify the effectiveness of AIC-SVD, it is compared with wavelet threshold denoising (WTD) and empirical mode decomposition with Savitzky-Golay filter (EMD-SG). Furthermore, a comprehensive indicator of denoising (CID) is introduced to describe the denoising performance. The results show that the denoising effect of AIC-SVD is significantly better than those of WTD and EMD-SG. On applying AIC-SVD to the micro-vibration signals of reaction wheels, the weak harmonic parameters can be successfully extracted during pre-processing. The proposed method is self-adaptable and robust while avoiding the occurrence of over-denoising.

Noise Reduction for MEMS Gyroscope Signal: A Novel Method Combining ACMP with Adaptive Multiscale SG Filter Based on AMA

In this paper, a novel hybrid method combining adaptive chirp mode pursuit (ACMP) with an adaptive multiscale Savitzky–Golay filter (AMSGF) based on adaptive moving average (AMA) is proposed for offline denoising micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) gyroscope signal. The denoising scheme includes preliminary denoising and further denoising. At the preliminary denoising stage, the original gyroscope signal is decomposed into signal modes one by one using ACMP with modified stopping criterion based on mutual information. Useful information is extracted while most noise is discarded in the residue at this stage. Then, AMSGF is proposed to further denoise the signal modes. Sample variance based on AMA is used to adjust the window size of AMSGF adaptively. Practical MEMS gyroscope signal denoising results under different motion conditions show the superior performance of the proposed method over empirical mode decomposition (EMD)-based denoising, discrete wavelet threshold denoising, and variational mode decomposition (VMD)-based denoising. Moreover, AMSGF is proven to gain a better denoising effect than some other common smoothing methods.

A Wavelet Transform-Based Neural Network Denoising Algorithm for Mobile Phonocardiography

Cardiovascular pathologies cause 23.5% of human deaths, worldwide. An auto-diagnostic system monitoring heart activity, which can identify the early symptoms of cardiac illnesses, might reduce the death rate caused by these problems. Phonocardiography (PCG) is one of the possible techniques able to detect heart problems. Nevertheless, acoustic signal enhancement is required since it is exposed to various disturbances coming from different sources. The most common denoising enhancement is based on the Wavelet Transform (WT). However, the WT is highly susceptible to variations in the noise frequency distribution. This paper proposes a new adaptive denoising algorithm, which combines WT and Time Delay Neural Networks (TDNN). The acquired signal is decomposed by means of the WT using the coif five-wavelet basis at the tenth decomposition level and then provided as input to the TDNN. Besides the advantage of adaptive thresholding, the reason for using TDNNs is their capacity of estimating the Inverse Wavelet Transform (IWT). The best parameters of the TDNN were found for a NN consisting of 25 neurons in the first and 15 in the second layer and the delay block of 12 samples. The method was evaluated on several pathological heart sounds and on signals recorded in a noisy environment. The performance of the developed system with respect to other wavelet-based denoising approaches was validated by the online questionnaire.

Dual tree complex wavelet transform-based signal denoising method exploiting neighbourhood dependencies and goodness-of-fit test

A novel signal denoising method is proposed whereby goodness-of-fit (GOF) test in combination with a majority classifications-based neighbourhood filtering is employed on complex wavelet coefficients obtained by applying dual tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) on a noisy signal. The DT-CWT has proven to be a better tool for signal denoising as compared to the conventional discrete wavelet transform (DWT) owing to its approximate translation invariance. The proposed framework exploits statistical neighbourhood dependencies by performing the GOF test locally on the DT-CWT coefficients for their preliminary classification/detection as signal or noise. Next, a deterministic neighbourhood filtering approach based on majority noise classifications is employed to detect false classification of signal coefficients as noise (via the GOF test) which are subsequently restored. The proposed method shows competitive performance against the state of the art in signal denoising.

Profiling the propagation of error from PPG to HRV features in a wearable physiological-monitoring device

Wearable physiological monitors are becoming increasingly commonplace in the consumer domain, but in literature there exists no substantive studies of their performance when measuring the physiology of ambulatory patients. In this Letter, the authors investigate the reliability of the heart-rate (HR) sensor in an exemplar ‘wearable’ wrist-worn monitoring system (the Microsoft Band 2); their experiments quantify the propagation of error from (i) the photoplethysmogram (PPG) acquired by pulse oximetry, to (ii) estimation of HR, and (iii) subsequent calculation of HR variability (HRV) features. Their experiments confirm that motion artefacts account for the majority of this error, and show that the unreliable portions of HR data can be removed, using the accelerometer sensor from the wearable device. The experiments further show that acquired signals contain noise with substantial energy in the high-frequency band, and that this contributes to subsequent variability in standard HRV features often used in clinical practice. The authors finally show that the conventional use of long-duration windows of data is not needed to perform accurate estimation of time-domain HRV features.

Towards a Continuous Biometric System Based on ECG Signals Acquired on the Steering Wheel

Electrocardiogram signals acquired through a steering wheel could be the key to seamless, highly comfortable, and continuous human recognition in driving settings. This paper focuses on the enhancement of the unprecedented lesser quality of such signals, through the combination of Savitzky-Golay and moving average filters, followed by outlier detection and removal based on normalised cross-correlation and clustering, which was able to render ensemble heartbeats of significantly higher quality. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Haar transform features were extracted and fed to decision methods based on Support Vector Machines (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN), Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), and Gaussian Mixture Models - Universal Background Models (GMM-UBM) classifiers, for both identification and authentication tasks. Additional techniques of user-tuned authentication and past score weighting were also studied. The method’s performance was comparable to some of the best recent state-of-the-art methods (94.9% identification rate (IDR) and 2.66% authentication equal error rate (EER)), despite lesser results with scarce train data (70.9% IDR and 11.8% EER). It was concluded that the method was suitable for biometric recognition with driving electrocardiogram signals, and could, with future developments, be used on a continuous system in seamless and highly noisy settings.

Electrocardiograph signal denoising based on sparse decomposition

Noise in ECG signals will affect the result of post-processing if left untreated. Since ECG is highly subjective, the linear denoising method with a specific threshold working well on one subject could fail on another. Therefore, in this Letter, sparse-based method, which represents every segment of signal using different linear combinations of atoms from a dictionary, is used to denoise ECG signals, with a view to myoelectric interference existing in ECG signals. Firstly, a denoising model for ECG signals is constructed. Then the model is solved by matching pursuit algorithm. In order to get better results, four kinds of dictionaries are investigated with the ECG signals from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database, compared with wavelet transform (WT)-based method. Signal-noise ratio (SNR) and mean square error (MSE) between estimated signal and original signal are used as indicators to evaluate the performance. The results show that by using the present method, the SNR is higher while the MSE between estimated signal and original signal is smaller.

Effects of ageing and Alzheimer disease on haemodynamic response function: a challenge for event-related fMRI

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can generate brain images that show neuronal activity due to sensory, cognitive or motor tasks. Haemodynamic response function (HRF) may be considered as a biomarker to discriminate the Alzheimer disease (AD) from healthy ageing. As blood-oxygenation-level-dependent fMRI signal is much weak and noisy, particularly for the elderly subjects, a robust method is necessary for HRF estimation to efficiently differentiate the AD. After applying minimum description length wavelet as an extra denoising step, deconvolution algorithm is here employed for HRF estimation, substituting the averaging method used in the previous works. The HRF amplitude peaks are compared for three groups HRF of young, non-demented and demented elderly groups for both vision and motor regions. Prior works often reported significant differences in the HRF peak amplitude between the young and the elderly. The authors’ experimentations show that the HRF peaks are not significantly different comparing the young adults with the elderly (either demented or non-demented). It is here demonstrated that the contradictory findings of the previous studies on the HRF peaks for the elderly compared with the young are originated from the noise contribution in fMRI data.

Denoising techniques in adaptive multi-resolution domains with applications to biomedical images

Variational mode decomposition (VMD) is a new adaptive multi-resolution technique suitable for signal denoising purpose. The main focus of this work has been to study the feasibility of several image denoising techniques in empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and VMD domains. A comparative study is made using 11 techniques widely used in the literature, including Wiener filter, first-order local statistics, fourth partial differential equation, nonlinear complex diffusion process, linear complex diffusion process (LCDP), probabilistic non-local means, non-local Euclidean medians, non-local means, non-local patch regression, discrete wavelet transform and wavelet packet transform. On the basis of comparison of 396 denoising based on peak signal-to-noise ratio, it is found that the best performances are obtained in VMD domain when appropriate denoising techniques are applied. Particularly, it is found that LCDP in combination with VMD performs the best and that VMD is faster than EMD.

Common-mode noise cancellation circuit for wearable ECG

Wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) is attracting much attention for monitoring heart diseases in healthcare and medical applications. However, an imbalance usually exists between the contact resistances of sensing electrodes, so that a common mode noise caused by external electromagnetic field can be converted into the ECG detection circuit as a differential mode interference voltage. In this study, after explaining the mechanism of how the common mode noise is converted to a differential mode interference voltage, the authors propose a circuit with cadmium sulphide photo-resistors for cancelling the imbalance between the contact resistances and confirm its validity by simulation experiment. As a result, the authors found that the interference voltage generated at the wearable ECG can be effectively reduced to a sufficient small level.

Noise-aware dictionary-learning-based sparse representation framework for detection and removal of single and combined noises from ECG signal

Automatic electrocardiogram (ECG) signal enhancement has become a crucial pre-processing step in most ECG signal analysis applications. In this Letter, the authors propose an automated noise-aware dictionary learning-based generalised ECG signal enhancement framework which can automatically learn the dictionaries based on the ECG noise type for effective representation of ECG signal and noises, and can reduce the computational load of sparse representation-based ECG enhancement system. The proposed framework consists of noise detection and identification, noise-aware dictionary learning, sparse signal decomposition and reconstruction. The noise detection and identification is performed based on the moving average filter, first-order difference, and temporal features such as number of turning points, maximum absolute amplitude, zerocrossings, and autocorrelation features. The representation dictionary is learned based on the type of noise identified in the previous stage. The proposed framework is evaluated using noise-free and noisy ECG signals. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce computational load as compared with conventional dictionary learning-based ECG denoising approaches. Further, comparative results show that the method outperforms existing methods in automatically removing noises such as baseline wanders, power-line interference, muscle artefacts and their combinations without distorting the morphological content of local waves of ECG signal.

Electrocardiogram Signal Denoising Using Extreme-Point Symmetric Mode Decomposition and Nonlocal Means

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals contain a great deal of essential information which can be utilized by physicians for the diagnosis of heart diseases. Unfortunately, ECG signals are inevitably corrupted by noise which will severely affect the accuracy of cardiovascular disease diagnosis. Existing ECG signal denoising methods based on wavelet shrinkage, empirical mode decomposition and nonlocal means (NLM) cannot provide sufficient noise reduction or well-detailed preservation, especially with high noise corruption. To address this problem, we have proposed a hybrid ECG signal denoising scheme by combining extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition (ESMD) with NLM. In the proposed method, the noisy ECG signals will first be decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and adaptive global mean using ESMD. Then, the first several IMFs will be filtered by the NLM method according to the frequency of IMFs while the QRS complex detected from these IMFs as the dominant feature of the ECG signal and the remaining IMFs will be left unprocessed. The denoised IMFs and unprocessed IMFs are combined to produce the final denoised ECG signals. Experiments on both simulated ECG signals and real ECG signals from the MIT-BIH database demonstrate that the proposed method can suppress noise in ECG signals effectively while preserving the details very well, and it outperforms several state-of-the-art ECG signal denoising methods in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), root mean squared error (RMSE), percent root mean square difference (PRD) and mean opinion score (MOS) error index.

Efficient and robust ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation detection method for wearable cardiac health monitoring devices

In this Letter, the authors propose an efficient and robust method for automatically determining the VT and VF events in the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. The proposed method consists of: (i) discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based noise suppression; (ii) addition of bipolar sequence of amplitudes with alternating polarity; (iii) zero-crossing rate (ZCR) estimation-based VTVF detection; and (iv) peak-to-peak interval (PPI) feature based VT/VF discrimination. The proposed method is evaluated using 18,000 episodes of different ECG arrhythmias taken from 6 PhysioNet databases. The method achieves an average sensitivity (Se) of 99.61%, specificity (Sp) of 99.96%, and overall accuracy (OA) of 99.92% in detecting VTVF and non-VTVF episodes by using a ZCR feature. Results show that the method achieves a Se of 100%, Sp of 99.70% and OA of 99.85% for discriminating VT from VF episodes using PPI features extracted from the processed signal. The robustness of the method is tested using different kinds of ECG beats and various types of noises including the baseline wanders, powerline interference and muscle artefacts. Results demonstrate that the proposed method with the ZCR, PPI features can achieve significantly better detection rates as compared with the existing methods.

Computationally efficient real-time interpolation algorithm for non-uniform sampled biosignals

This Letter presents a novel, computationally efficient interpolation method that has been optimised for use in electrocardiogram baseline drift removal. In the authors’ previous Letter three isoelectric baseline points per heartbeat are detected, and here utilised as interpolation points. As an extension from linear interpolation, their algorithm segments the interpolation interval and utilises different piecewise linear equations. Thus, the algorithm produces a linear curvature that is computationally efficient while interpolating non-uniform samples. The proposed algorithm is tested using sinusoids with different fundamental frequencies from 0.05 to 0.7 Hz and also validated with real baseline wander data acquired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology University and Boston's Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) Noise Stress Database. The synthetic data results show an root mean square (RMS) error of 0.9 μV (mean), 0.63 μV (median) and 0.6 μV (standard deviation) per heartbeat on a 1 mV_p–p 0.1 Hz sinusoid. On real data, they obtain an RMS error of 10.9 μV (mean), 8.5 μV (median) and 9.0 μV (standard deviation) per heartbeat. Cubic spline interpolation and linear interpolation on the other hand shows 10.7 μV, 11.6 μV (mean), 7.8 μV, 8.9 μV (median) and 9.8 μV, 9.3 μV (standard deviation) per heartbeat.

Fuzzy-entropy threshold based on a complex wavelet denoising technique to diagnose Alzheimer disease

The presence of irregularities in electroencephalographic (EEG) signals entails complexities during the Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis. In addition, the uncertainty presented on EEG raises major issues in the improvement of the classification rate. The multi-resolution analysis through an optimum threshold will likely achieve better results in distinguishing AD and normal EEG signals. Hence, a fuzzy-entropy concept defined in a complex multi-resolution wavelet has been proposed to obtain the most appropriate threshold. First, the complex coefficients are fuzzified using a Gaussian membership function. Afterwards, the ability of the proposed fuzzy-entropy threshold has been compared with traditional thresholds in complex wavelet domain. Experimental results show that the authors' methodology produces a higher signal-to-noise ratio and a lower root-mean-square error than traditional approaches. Moreover, a neural network scheme is performed along several features to classify AD from normal EEG signals obtaining a specificity of 87.5%.

Exploiting multi-lead electrocardiogram correlations using robust third-order tensor decomposition

In this Letter, a robust third-order tensor decomposition of multi-lead electrocardiogram (MECG) comprising of 12-leads is proposed to reduce the dimension of the storage data. An order-3 tensor structure is employed to represent the MECG data by rearranging the MECG information in three dimensions. The three-dimensions of the formed tensor represent the number of leads, beats and samples of some fixed ECG duration. Dimension reduction of such an arrangement exploits correlations present among the successive beats (intra-beat and inter-beat) and across the leads (inter-lead). The higher-order singular value decomposition is used to decompose the tensor data. In addition, multiscale analysis has been added for effective care of ECG information. It grossly segments the ECG characteristic waves (P-wave, QRS-complex, ST-segment and T-wave etc.) into different sub-bands. In the meantime, it separates high-frequency noise components into lower-order sub-bands which helps in removing noise from the original data. For evaluation purposes, we have used the publicly available PTB diagnostic database. The proposed method outperforms the existing algorithms where compression ratio is under 10 for MECG data. Results show that the original MECG data volume can be reduced by more than 45 times with acceptable diagnostic distortion level.

Baseline wander removal of electrocardiogram signals using multivariate empirical mode decomposition

A new method for removing the baseline wander (BW) noise based on multivariate empirical mode decomposition is presented. The proposed method is compared with recently introduced technique for BW removal using Hilbert vibration decomposition in terms of correlation coefficient criterion and signal-to-noise ratio. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, real BW signals are added to synthetic and clinical electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. It is shown that presented methodology has significant scope of removing BW noise in real world ECG signals.

Comparative study of ECG signal denoising by wavelet thresholding in empirical and variational mode decomposition domains

Hybrid denoising models based on combining empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) were found to be effective in removing additive Gaussian noise from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Recently, variational mode decomposition (VMD) has been proposed as a multiresolution technique that overcomes some of the limits of the EMD. Two ECG denoising approaches are compared. The first is based on denoising in the EMD domain by DWT thresholding, whereas the second is based on noise reduction in the VMD domain by DWT thresholding. Using signal-to-noise ratio and mean of squared errors as performance measures, simulation results show that the VMD-DWT approach outperforms the conventional EMD-DWT. In addition, a non-local means approach used as a reference technique provides better results than the VMD-DWT approach.