Independent Component Analysis in ECG Signal Processing

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal processing aims basically 1) at artifact reduction to make the ECG signals cleaner and better interpretable by human or machine observers, 2) at revealing aspects not immediately observable in plain measured ECG signals even after artifact reduction, or 3) at diagnostics decision support and automated ECG signal interpretation, including classification of ECG signals into different classes associated with normal or pathological heart function. Thus, sports related applications aside, body surface ECG signal processing aims at enhancing ECG based diagnostics. In this Chapter, we review and demonstrate a statistical signal processing approach, independent component analysis (ICA), which is inherently very suitable for ECG signal processing regarding the aims 1) and 2) above, and also equally applicable as a component in systems aimed at accomplishing the aim 3). For more on general ECG signal processing, the reader is directed to the textbook written by Sörnmo & Laguna (2005), and for a thorough treatment of ICA to the Hyvärinen’s book (Hyvärinen et al., 2001). A concise review on ICA in ECG signal processing has been presented by Castells et al. (2007a). In this Chapter, we describe and illustrate several widely adopted applications of ICA in ECG signal processing, and discuss associated practical aspects, some of which are not generally found in the literature. The treatment of the matter is aimed at conceptual and practical understanding, leaving the mathematical derivations and proofs far mostly for the interested reader to find in the references. ICA (Castells et al., 2007a; Comon, 1994; Hyvärinen et al., 2001; Hyvärinen & Oja, 2000; Naik & Kumar, 2011) is a statistical signal processing method for decomposing a set of signals into a set of mutually independent component signals. In general, in the applications of ICA, including in ECG signal processing, the objective is that the resulting independent component signals are the original source signals. Since ICA operates purely based on the input signals and a few assumptions, ICA belongs to the class of methods called blind source separation methods. For ICA, a source signal is called an independent component (IC). The terms ‘IC’ and ‘source signal’ are here used interchangeably. For ECG, the source signals are the bioelectrical signals generated by the heart, and all the possible artifact signals. Generally, ICA input signals are the observed signals, which may be measurement time series, such as sampled voltage values in time as in the case of ECGs, image pixel values, or basically any sets of values fulfilling the assumptions of ICA. In the sequel, the term