A pseudodifferential amplifier for bioelectric events with DC-offset compensation using two-wired amplifying electrodes

Most wired active electrodes reported so far have a gain of one and require at least three wires. This leads to stiff cables, large connectors and additional noise for the amplifier. The theoretical advantages of amplifying the signal on the electrodes right from the source has often been described, however, rarely implemented. This is because a difference in the gain of the electrodes due to component tolerances strongly limits the achievable common mode rejection ratio (CMRR). In this paper, we introduce an amplifier for bioelectric events where the major part of the amplification (40 dB) is achieved on the electrodes to minimize pick-up noise. The electrodes require only two wires of which one can be used for shielding, thus enabling smaller connecters and smoother cables. Saturation of the electrodes is prevented by a dc-offset cancelation scheme with an active range of +/- 250 mV. This error feedback simultaneously allows to measure the low frequency components down to dc. This enables the measurement of slow varying signals, e.g., the change of alertness or the depolarization before an epileptic seizure normally not visible in a standard electroencephalogram (EEG). The amplifier stage provides the necessary supply current for the electrodes and generates the error signal for the feedback loop. The amplifier generates a pseudodifferential signal where the amplified bioelectric event is present on one lead, but the common mode signal is present on both leads. Based on the pseudodifferential signal we were able to develop a new method to compensate for a difference in the gain of the active electrodes which is purely software based. The amplifier system is then characterized and the input referred noise as well as the CMRR are measured. For the prototype circuit the CMRR evaluated to 78 dB (without the driven-right-leg circuit). The applicability of the system is further demonstrated by the recording of an ECG.     

Fetal Electrocardiogram Enhancement by Time-Sequenced Adaptive Filtering

An adaptive method for performing optimal time-varying filtering of nonstationary signals having a recurring statistical character, e.g., recurring pulses in noise, has been proposed. This method, called time-sequenced adaptive filtering, is applied to the enhancement of abdominally derived fetal electrocardiograms against background muscle noise. It is shown that substantial improvement in terms of signal distortion is obtained when time-sequenced filtering, rather than conventional time-invariant filtering, is employed. The method requires two or more abdominal channels containing correlated signal components, but uncorrelated muscle noise components. The location of the fetal pulses in time must be estimated in order to synchronize the filter's time-varying impulse response to the fetal cardiac cycle.     

A new method for the extraction of fetal ECG from the composite abdominal signal

We developed a wavelet transform-based method to extract the fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) from the composite abdominal signal. This is based on the detection of the singularities obtained from the composite abdominal signal, using the modulus maxima in the wavelet domain. Modulus maxima locations of the abdominal signal are used to discriminate between maternal and fetal ECG signals. Two different approaches have been considered. In the first approach, at least one thoracic signal is used as the a prior to perform the classification whereas in the second approach no thoracic signal is needed. A reconstruction method is utilized to obtain the fetal ECG signal from the detected fetal modulus maxima. The proposed technique is different from the classical time-domain methods, in that we exploit the most distinct features of the signal, leading to more robustness with respect to signal perturbations. Results of experiments with both synthetic and real ECG data have been presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.     

Spectrum-Sensing Algorithms for Cognitive Radio Based on Statistical Covariances

Spectrum sensing, i.e., detecting the presence of primary users in a licensed spectrum, is a fundamental problem in cognitive radio. Since the statistical covariances of the received signal and noise are usually different, they can be used to differentiate the case where the primary user's signal is present from the case where there is only noise. In this paper, spectrum-sensing algorithms are proposed based on the sample covariance matrix calculated from a limited number of received signal samples. Two test statistics are then extracted from the sample covariance matrix. A decision on the signal presence is made by comparing the two test statistics. Theoretical analysis for the proposed algorithms is given. Detection probability and the associated threshold are found based on the statistical theory. The methods do not need any information about the signal, channel, and noise power a priori. In addition, no synchronization is needed. Simulations based on narrow-band signals, captured digital television (DTV) signals, and multiple antenna signals are presented to verify the methods.     

An interference cancellation algorithm for noninvasive extraction of transabdominal fetal electroencephalogram (TaFEEG)

The electroencephalogram is a noninvasive method of demonstrating cerebral function. The fetal electroencephalogram (FEEG) contains important information regarding the status of a fetus. It is believed that disorganization of normal FEEG development may help detect the onset of cerebral palsy and mental retardation syndromes. Unfortunately, noninvasive methods of monitoring FEEG are not currently available. Noninvasively obtained abdominal surface electrical recordings include FEEG components, but are dominated by large interfering components, and, thus, have very low signal to noise ratio. In this paper, we propose a multistep extraction procedure to separate the four main components in transabdominal recordings: 1) maternal ECG; 2) FECG; and 3) FEEG signals as well as 4) interfering baseline wander. The algorithm is tested on simulated and real transabdominal recordings. This study shows that the proposed method successfully extracts the desired FEEG signal.     

Body movement activity recognition for ambulatory cardiac monitoring

Wearable electrocardiogram (W-ECG) recorders are increasingly in use by people suffering from cardiac abnormalities who also choose to lead an active lifestyle. The challenge presently is that the ECG signal is influenced by motion artifacts induced by body movement activity (BMA) of the wearer. The usual practice is to develop effective filtering algorithms which will eliminate artifacts. Instead, our goal is to detect the motion artifacts and classify the type of BMA from the ECG signal itself. We have recorded the ECG signals during specified BMAs, e.g., sitting still, walking, movements of arms and climbing stairs, etc. with a single-lead system. The collected ECG signal during BMA is presumed to be an additive mix of signals due to cardiac activities, motion artifacts and sensor noise. A particular class of BMA is characterized by applying eigen decomposition on the corresponding ECG data. The classification accuracies range from 70% to 98% for various class combinations of BMAs depending on their uniqueness based on this technique. The above classification is also useful for analysis of P and T waves in the presence of BMA.     

Multichannel ECG data compression by multirate signal processingand transform domain coding techniques

A multilead electrocardiography (ECG) data compression method is presented. First, a linear transform is applied to the standard ECG lead signals, which are highly correlated with each other. In this way a set of uncorrelated transform domain signals is obtained. Then, the resulting transform domain signals are compressed using various coding methods, including multirate signal processing and transform domain coding techniques     

A rate distortion optimal ECG coding algorithm

Signal compression is an important problem encountered in many applications. Various techniques have been proposed over the years for addressing the problem. In this paper, we present a time domain algorithm based on the coding of line segments which are used to approximate the signal. These segments are fit in a way that is optimal in the rate distortion sense. Although the approach is applicable to any type of signal, we focus, in this paper, on the compression of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. ECG signal compression has traditionally been tackled by heuristic approaches. However, it has been demonstrated [1] that exact optimization algorithms outperform these heuristic approaches by a wide margin with respect to reconstruction error. By formulating the compression problem as a graph theory problem, known optimization theory can be applied in order to yield optimal compression. In this paper, we present an algorithm that will guarantee the smallest possible distortion among all methods applying linear interpolation given an upper bound on the available number of bits. Using a varied signal test set, extensive coding experiments are presented. We compare the results from our coding method to traditional time domain ECG compression methods, as well as, to more recently developed frequency domain methods. Evaluation is based both on percentage root-mean-square difference (PRD) performance measure and visual inspection of the reconstructed signals. The results demonstrate that the exact optimization methods have superior performance compared to both traditional ECG compression methods and the frequency domain methods.     

An adaptive Kalman filter for ECG signal enhancement

The ongoing trend of ECG monitoring techniques to become more ambulatory and less obtrusive generally comes at the expense of decreased signal quality. To enhance this quality, consecutive ECG complexes can be averaged triggered on the heartbeat, exploiting the quasi-periodicity of the ECG. However, this averaging constitutes a tradeoff between improvement of the SNR and loss of clinically relevant physiological signal dynamics. Using a bayesian framework, in this paper, a sequential averaging filter is developed that, in essence, adaptively varies the number of complexes included in the averaging based on the characteristics of the ECG signal. The filter has the form of an adaptive Kalman filter. The adaptive estimation of the process and measurement noise covariances is performed by maximizing the bayesian evidence function of the sequential ECG estimation and by exploiting the spatial correlation between several simultaneously recorded ECG signals, respectively. The noise covariance estimates thus obtained render the filter capable of ascribing more weight to newly arriving data when these data contain morphological variability, and of reducing this weight in cases of no morphological variability. The filter is evaluated by applying it to a variety of ECG signals. To gauge the relevance of the adaptive noise-covariance estimation, the performance of the filter is compared to that of a Kalman filter with fixed, (a posteriori) optimized noise covariance. This comparison demonstrates that, without using a priori knowledge on signal characteristics, the filter with adaptive noise estimation performs similar to the filter with optimized fixed noise covariance, favoring the adaptive filter in cases where no a priori information is available or where signal characteristics are expected to fluctuate.     

Multiple channel detection of steady-state visual evoked potentials for brain-computer interfaces

In this paper, novel methods for detecting steady-state visual evoked potentials using multiple electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are presented. The methods are tailored for brain-computer interfacing, where fast and accurate detection is of vital importance for achieving high information transfer rates. High detection accuracy using short time segments is obtained by finding combinations of electrode signals that cancel strong interference signals in the EEG data. Data from a test group consisting of 10 subjects are used to evaluate the new methods and to compare them to standard techniques. Using 1-s signal segments, six different visual stimulation frequencies could be discriminated with an average classification accuracy of 84%. An additional advantage of the presented methodology is that it is fully online, i.e., no calibration data for noise estimation, feature extraction, or electrode selection is needed.     

Robust adaptive array for wireless communications

In the application of a receiver antenna array to wireless communications, a known signal preamble is used for estimating the propagation vector at the beginning of each data frame. The estimated propagation vector is then used in linear combining of array inputs for interference suppression and demodulation of a desired user's information data stream. Since the training preamble is usually very short, conventional training methods, which estimate the propagation vector based solely on the training preamble, may incur large estimation errors. In many wireless channels, the ambient noise is known to be decidedly non-Gaussian, due to impulsive phenomena. The conventional training methods may suffer further from such impulsive noise. Moreover, performance of linear combining techniques can degrade substantially in the presence of impulsive noise. We first propose a new technique for propagation vector estimation which exploits the whole frame of the received signal. It is shown that as the length of the signal frame tends to infinity, in the absence of noise, this method can recover the propagation vector of the desired user exactly, given a small number of training symbols for that user. We then develop robust techniques for propagation vector estimation and array combining in the presence of impulsive noise. These techniques are nonlinear in nature and are based on the M-estimation method. It is seen that the proposed robust methods offer performance improvement over linear techniques in non-Gaussian noise, with little attendant increase in computational complexity. Finally, we address the extension of the proposed techniques to dispersive channels with intersymbol interference     

Adaptive filter for event-related bioelectric signals using animpulse correlated reference input: comparison with signal averagingtechniques

Many bioelectric signals result from the electrical response of physiological systems to an impulse that can be internal (ECG signals) or external (evoked potentials). In this paper an adaptive impulse correlated filter (AICF) for event-related signals that are time-locked to a stimulus is presented. This filter estimates the deterministic component of the signal and removes the noise uncorrelated with the stimulus, even if this noise is colored, as in the case of evoked potentials. The filter needs two inputs: the signal (primary input) and an impulse correlated with the deterministic component (reference input). We use the LMS algorithm to adjust the weights in the adaptive process. First, we show that the AICF is equivalent to exponentially weighted averaging (EWA) when using the LMS algorithm. A quantitative analysis of the signal-to-noise ratio improvement, convergence, and misadjustment error is presented. A comparison of the AICF with ensemble averaging (EA) and moving window averaging (MWA) techniques is also presented. The adaptive filter is applied to real high-resolution ECG signals and time-varying somatosensory evoked potentials.     

Alignment methods for averaging of high-resolution cardiac signals:a comparative study of performance

Accurate signal estimation by means of coherent averaging techniques needs temporal alignment methods. A known low-pass filtering effect is yielded when alignment errors are present. This is very critical in the estimation of low-level high-frequency potentials in high-resolution ECG analysis. A comparative study of the performance of three alignment methods (the double-level method, a new time-delay estimation method based on normalized integrals, and matched filtering) is presented in this paper. A real signal and additive random noise for several signal-to-noise ratios (SNR's) are selected to make an ensemble of computer-simulated beats. The relation between the standard deviation of temporal misalignment versus SNR is discussed. A second study with real ECG signals is also presented. Several morphologies of QRS and P waves are tested. The results are in agreement with the computer simulation study. Nevertheless, the power spectrum of the noise process can affect the results. Matched filter estimation has been tested in the presence of power line interference (50 Hz), with poor results. An application of the three alignment methods as a function of the SNR is proposed. The new time-delay estimation method has been observed to be robust, even in the presence of nonwhite noise.     

Processing the Abdominal Fetal ECG

A system capable of recording fetal electrocardiograms and fetal vectorcardiograms is described. This system has enabled us to record signals of higher quality than any that have been published to date. It is also possible to study some of the diagnostic potentials of the fetal electrocardiogram signal during the course of gestation. Records with this system have been obtained during the period of 20 weeks to 40 weeks gestation using active surface electrodes placed on the mother's abdomen. The system has the following features: 1. low noise recording of the fetal signal; 2. signal averaging to improve signal to noise ratio; 3. removal of the maternal electrocardiogram component; 4. coordinate axis rotation for the display of the fetal vectorcardiogram and/or electrocardiogram in any convenient frame of reference. This system is currently being used to study the characteristics of the human fetal electrocardiogram in vivo.     

Extraction of fetal electrocardiogram using adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems

In this paper, we investigate the use of adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) for fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) extraction from two ECG signals recorded at the thoracic and abdominal areas of the mother's skin. The thoracic ECG is assumed to be almost completely maternal (MECG) while the abdominal ECG is considered to be composite as it contains both the mother's and the fetus' ECG signals. The maternal component in the abdominal ECG signal is a nonlinearly transformed version of the MECG. We use an ANFIS network to identify this nonlinear relationship, and to align the MECG signal with the maternal component in the abdominal ECG signal. Thus, we extract the FECG component by subtracting the aligned version of the MECG signal from the abdominal ECG signal. We validate our technique on both real and synthetic ECG signals. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in extracting the FECG component from abdominal signals of very low maternal to fetal signal-to-noise ratios. The results also show that the technique is capable of extracting the FECG even when it is totally embedded within the maternal QRS complex.     

Abdominal-Lead Fetal Electrocardiographic R-Wave Enhancement for Heart Rate Determination

The reliability of fetal heart rate (FHR) from external abdominal-lead electrocardiographic waveforms depends upon the R-wave detection capability of the monitoring device. Assuming that the maternal component of the ECG is canceiled by techniques described elsewhere [1]-[4], we are left with a fetal electrocardiogm (FECG) which may be conrupted by high noise levels. This paper describes several digital signal processing techniques by which the detection of fetal R-waves is improved. These techniques-narrow band-pass filtering, local peak differencing, autoregressive filtering, and matched filtering-are theoretically developed. The performance of each technique is measured and analyzed for two sample fetal ECG inputs.     

Narrowband weak signal detection by higher order spectrum

A study of narrowband weak signal detection by higher order spectrum (HOS) using real signals and real noise, rather than just Gaussian noise, is presented. Noisy real signals are processed using various HOS techniques. We propose to look at the diagonal slices of the bispectrum and the trispectrum as possible substitutes for the power spectrum. The result of applying these slices to weak, real signals is surprisingly good. The dramatic improvements are presented for visual inspection. The performance of the various techniques are then compared quantitatively for different signal-to-noise ratios. The diagonal slices prove to be fast and robust techniques for weak signal detection     

Decomposition and compression for ECG and EEG signals with sequence index coding method based on matching pursuit

An efficient compression method is proposed by encoding the sequence index of atoms based on matching pursuit (MP)algorithm with over-complete Gabor dictionary,which has the merit to adjust the compres...     

Ventricular Intramyocardial Electrograms and Their Expected Potential for Cardiac Risk Surveillance, Telemonitoring, and Therapy Management

Ventricular intramyocardial electrograms are recorded with electrodes directly from the heart either in intraventricular or epimyocardial position and may be acquired either from the spontaneously beating or from the paced heart. The morphology of these signals differs significantly from that of body surface ECG recordings. Although the morphology shows general characteristics, it additionally depends on different individual impacts. This problem of individual evaluation is briefly discussed. As an appropriate methodology for its solution, personalized referencing based on similarity averaging has been employed. A more general approach may be model-based signal interpretation, which is still under investigation. The preliminary results reveal a promising potential of intramyocardial electrograms for cardiac risk surveillance, e.g., for arrhythmia detection, recognition of rejection events in transplanted hearts, and assessment of hemodynamic performance. Employing implants with telemetric capabilities may render possible permanent and even continuous cardiac telemonitoring. Furthermore, the signals can be utilized for supporting therapy management, e.g., in patients with different kinds of cardiomyopathies. This paper shall demonstrate some preliminary results and discuss the expected potential.      

Setting adaptive spike detection threshold for smoothed TEO based on robust statistics theory

We propose a novel approach aimed at adaptively setting the threshold of the smoothed Teager energy operator (STEO) detector to be used in extracellular recording of neural signals. In this proposed approach, to set the adaptive threshold of the STEO detector, we derive the relationship between the low-order statistics of its input signal and the ones of its output signal. This relationship is determined with only the background noise component assumed to be present at the input. Robust statistics theory techniques were used to achieve an unbiased estimation of these low-order statistics of the background noise component directly from the neural input signal. In this paper, the emphasis is made on extracellular neural recordings. However, the proposed method can be used in the analysis of different biomedical signals where spikes are important for diagnostic (e.g., ECG, EEG, etc.). We validated the efficacy of the proposed method using synthetic neural signals constructed from real neural recordings signals. Four different sets of extracellular recordings from four distinct neural sources have been exploited to that purpose. The first dataset is recorded from an adult male monkey using the Utath 10×10 microelectrode array implemented in the prefrontal cortex, the second one was obtained from the visual cortex of a rat using a stainless-steel-tipped microelectrode, the third dataset came from recording in a human medial lobe using intracranial electrode, and finally, the fourth one was extracted from recordings in a macaque parietal cortex using a single tetrode. Simulation results show that our approach is effective and robust, and outperforms state-of-the-art adaptive detection methods in its category (i.e., efficient and simple, and do not require a priori knowledge about neural spike waveforms shapes).