ECG signal enhancement using S-Transform

Electrocardiogram (ECG), which is a noninvasive technique, is used generally as a primary diagnostic tool for cardiovascular diseases. In real-time scenario, noises like channel noise, muscle artifacts, electrode motion and baseline wander are often embedded with ECG signals during acquisition and transmission. In this paper, an automatic ECG signal enhancement technique is proposed to remove noise components from time-frequency domain represented noisy ECG signal. Stockwell transform (S-Transform) is used in this work to represent the noisy ECG signal in time-frequency domain. Next, masking and filtering technique is applied to remove unwanted noise components from time-frequency domain. The proposed technique does not require any prior information like R-peak position or reference signal as auxiliary signal. This method is evaluated on ECG signals which are available in MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows better signal to noise ratio (SNR) and lower root means square error (RMSE) compared to earlier reported wavelet transform with soft thresholding (WT-Soft) and wavelet transform with subband dependent threshold (WT-Subband) based technique. To quantify the significant difference among all methods, the performances of different ECG enhancement techniques at 1.25 dB input SNR level are compared using analysis of variance (ANOVA) based statistical evaluation technique and it is seen that the proposed method yields superior performance compared to other methods. R-peak detection test is also conducted on enhanced ECG signal in addition to SNR and RMSE to evaluate the quality of biology-related information preserved in the enhanced ECG signal. The performance of R-peak detection for denoised ECG signals, in terms of sensitivity and positive predictivity using proposed enhancement method, is also better than WT-Soft, WT-Subband methods, and validates the superiority of the proposed method. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.