This paper presents new methods for baseline wander correction and powerline interference reduction in electrocardiogram (ECG) signals using empirical wavelet transform (EWT). During data acquisition of ECG signal, various noise sources such as powerline interference, baseline wander and muscle artifacts contaminate the information bearing ECG signal. For better analysis and interpretation, the ECG signal must be free of noise. In the present work, a new approach is used to filter baseline wander and power line interference from the ECG signal. The technique utilized is the empirical wavelet transform, which is a new method used to compute the building modes of a given signal. Its performance as a filter is compared to the standard linear filters and empirical mode decomposition.The results show that EWT delivers a better performance.

Background This article proposes an extension of empirical wavelet transform (EWT) algorithm for multivariate signals specifically applied to cardiovascular physiological signals. Materials and methods EWT is a newly proposed algorithm for extracting the modes in a signal and is based on the design of an adaptive wavelet filter bank. The proposed algorithm finds an optimum signal in the multivariate data set based on mode estimation strategy and then its corresponding spectra is segmented and utilized for extracting the modes across all the channels of the data set. Results The proposed algorithm is able to find the common oscillatory modes within the multivariate data and can be applied for multichannel heterogeneous data analysis having unequal number of samples in different channels. The proposed algorithm was tested on different synthetic multivariate data and a real physiological trivariate data series of electrocardiogram, respiration, and blood pressure to justify its validation. Conclusions In this article, the EWT is extended for multivariate signals and it was demonstrated that the component-wise processing of multivariate data leads to the alignment of common oscillating modes across the components.

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In this paper, we proposed an effective method for detecting fiducial points in arterial blood pressure pulses. An arterial blood pressure pulse normally consists of onset, systolic peak and dicrotic notch. Detection of fiducial points in blood pressure pulses is a critical task and has many potential applications. The proposed method employs empirical wavelet transform for locating the systolic peak and onset of blood pressure pulse. The proposed method first estimates the fundamental frequency of blood pressure pulse using empirical wavelet transform and utilizes the combination of the blood pressure pulse and the estimated frequency for locating onset and systolic peak. For dicrotic notch detection, it utilizes the first-order difference of blood pressure pulse. The algorithm was validated on various open-source databases and was tested on a data set containing 12,230 beats. Two benchmark parameters such as sensitivity and positive predictivity were used for the performance evaluation. The comparison results for accuracy of the detection of systolic peak, onset and dicrotic notch are reported. The proposed method attained a sensitivity and positive predictivity of 99.95% and 99.97%, respectively, for systolic peaks. For onsets, it attained a sensitivity and predictivity of 99.88% and 99.92%, respectively. For dicrotic notches, a sensitivity and positive predictivity of 98.98% and 98.81% were achieved, respectively.

Separating an information-bearing signal from the background noise is a general problem in signal processing. In a clinical environment during acquisition of an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal, The ECG signal is corrupted by various noise sources such as powerline interference (PLI), baseline wander and muscle artifacts. This paper presents novel methods for reduction of powerline interference in ECG signals using empirical wavelet transform (EWT) and adaptive filtering. The proposed methods are compared with the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) based PLI cancellation methods. A total of six methods for PLI reduction based on EMD and EWT are analysed and their results are presented in this paper. The EWT-based de-noising methods have less computational complexity and are more efficient as compared with the EMD-based de-noising methods.