ECG Signal Denoising Using an Improved Hybrid DWT-ADTF Approach

Abstract

Purpose: The electrocardiogram signal (ECG) presents a fundamental source of information to consider for the diagnosis of a heart condition. Given its low-frequency features, this signal is quite susceptible to various noise and interference sources. This paper presents an improved hybrid approach to ECG signal denoising based on the DWT and the ADTF methods.

Methods: The proposed improvements consist of integrating an adaptive [Formula: see text] parameter into the ADTF approach, combining a soft thresholding ADTF-based process with the DWT details, along with employing the mean filter to handle the baseline wandering noise. Furthermore, the proposed approach incorporates several denoising measures based on various proposed noise features, which have also been introduced in this approach. Several real noises collected from the Noise Stress Test Database (NSTDB), as well as several synthetic noises at different SNR levels, are proposed to ensure a thorough assessment of the proposed method's performance.

Results: The evaluation focuses on the SN Rimp, PRD, and MSE parameters, as well as the SINAD parameter as a diagnostic distortion measurement. Furthermore, a time complexity evaluation is proposed. The proposed approach demonstrated promising results compared to a recent hybridization of the DWT and ADTF methods, as well as recently published ECG signal denoising-based approaches in various real and synthetic noise cases using different statistical evaluation metrics.

Conclusion: In the vast majority of the study cases, the proposed approach outperforms the compared methods in terms of statistical results for real and synthetic noises. Furthermore, compared to these methods, it provides a fairly low time complexity. This is consistent with the ambition of embedding this approach in low-cost hardware architectures.

Keywords: ADTF; Adaptive parameter; DWT; ECG; Hybrid filter; Signal denoising; Thresholding process.