Noise Cancellation in ECG Signals with an Unbiased Adaptive Filter

The electrocardiographic (ECG) signal is a transthoracic manifestation of the electrical activity of the heart and is widely used in clinical applications. This chapter describes an unbiased linear adaptive filter (ULAF) to attenuate high-frequency random noise present in ECG signals. The ULAF does not contain a bias in its summation unit and the filter coefficients are normalized. During the adaptation process, the normalized coefficients are updated with the steepest-descent algorithm to achieve efficient filtering of noisy ECG signals. A total of 16 ECG signals were tested in the adaptive filtering experiments with the ULAF, the least-mean-square (LMS), and the recursive-least-squares (RLS) adaptive filters. The filtering performance was quantified in terms of the root-mean-squared error (RMSE), normalized correlation coefficient (NCC), and filtered noise entropy (FNE). A template derived from each ECG signal was used as the reference to compute the measures of filtering performance. The results indicated that the ULAF was able to provide noise-free ECG signals with an average RMSE of 0.0287, which was lower than the second-best RMSE obtained with the LMS filter. With respect to waveform fidelity, the ULAF provided the highest average NCC (0.9964) among the three filters studied. In addition, the ULAF effectively removed more noise, measured by FNE, in comparison with the LMS and RLS filters in most of the ECG signals tested. The issues of adaptive filter setting for noise reduction in ECG signals are discussed at the end of this chapter. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-553-7.ch022