Isolation of multiple electrocardiogram artifacts using independent vector analysis.

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 Sornmo & Laguna (2005), and for a thorough treatment of ICA to the Hyvarinen’s book (Hyvarinen 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; Hyvarinen et al., 2001; Hyvarinen & 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

Independent vector analysis (IVA) is a special form of independent component analysis (ICA), which has demonstrated its prominent performance in solving convolutive blind source separation (BSS) problems in the frequency domain. Most IVA algorithms are based on optimizing certain contrast functions, where the main difficulty of these approaches lies in finding a reliable and fast estimation of the unknown distribution of sources. Despite the rich availability of efficient tensorial approaches to the standard ICA problem, these methods have not been explored considerably for IVA. In this article, we propose a matrix joint diagonalization approach to solve the complex IVA problem. The new factorization neither relies on a whitening process, nor does it require an estimate of the joint probability distribution of the dependent signal groups. The latter is in contrast to most IVA approaches up to date. The underlying geometry of the problem is investigated together with a critical point analysis of the resulting cost function. A conjugate gradient algorithm on the appropriate manifold setting is developed.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are significantly distorted during recording by muscle artifact (MA), causing signal frequency overlap and making it difficult to interpret ECG data correctly. Deep learning (DL) methods for signal processing have shown promising results. However, there is a significant necessity in building proper DL models with appropriate datasets. We propose an enhanced hybrid deep learning framework called HRGB-Net based on residual neural network (ResNet), global channel attention block (GCAB), and bidirectional-long-short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) blocks for filtering the MA noise from ECG by using three distinctive MIT-BIH real-time datasets from the PhysioNet repository by creating suitable datasets for training. We use both raw ECG data and short-time Fourier-transformed (STFT) ECG data for comparative analysis with three neural network models: a convolutional neural Network (CNN), a fully connected neural network (FCNN), and a regression-based LSTM (Reg-LSTM-DNN) model to assess the proposed model. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of noisy ECG signals is varied from - 7dB to 2dB to analyze the mean square error (MSE) and correlation coefficient (CC) performances after the denoising process. Our proposed method utilizes the regression ability to remove MA noise and generate a clean ECG signal with improved values of these signal parameters. The STFT-trained and tested ECG data shows better results than the raw ECG data for efficiently eliminating the MA with a 98.82% correlation coefficient and optimal MSE value of 0.053068. The results prove our proposed HRGB-Net model's remarkable ability to outperform the neural network models and other standard techniques.

Independent vector analysis followed by HMM-based feature enhancement for robust speech recognition

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal enhancement is necessary in telemedicine. In such ECG monitoring systems, noises like muscle artifacts, electrode motion and baseline wander are often embedded in the ECG signals during acquisition and transmission. In this study, a novel method is proposed for the ECG signal enhancement based on the finding that ECG signals extracted over a big data share significant similarities in the morphology for a particular person. We construct a guided filter and reform it by a Butterworth high-pass filter. The Butterworth high-pass filter is utilized to remove the baseline wander. The advantageous edge-preserving guided filter is then applied to remove the rest noise, of which frequencies are between the ECG signals. Very promising results with high accuracy and the edge-preserving features have been achieved in the comparative experiments. We evaluated the proposed denoising method using ECG signals from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database and the Noise Stress Test database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and lower root mean square error (RMSE) when compared to the wavelet with subband dependent thresholding (WT-Subband), Back Propagation Neural Network and Stockwell transform methods. Using the proposed method, the average output SNR ranges from 8.57 to 19.28 dB, and the average RMSE is less than 0.41.

A new independent component analysis (ICA) formulation called independent vector analysis (IVA) was proposed in order to solve the permutation problem in convolutive blind source separation (BSS). Instead of running ICA in each frequency bin separately and correcting the disorder with an additional algorithmic scheme afterwards, IVA exploited the dependency among the frequency components of a source and dealt with them as a multivariate source by modeling it with sparse and spherically, or radially, symmetric joint probability density functions (pdfs). In this paper, we compare the speech separation performances of IVA by using a group of l <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">p</sup> -norm-invariant sparse pdfs where the value of and the sparseness can be controlled. Also, we derive an IVA algorithm from a nonparametric perspective with the constraint of spherical symmetry and high dimensionality. Simulation results confirm the efficiency of assuming sparseness and spherical symmetry for the speech model in the frequency domain.

Real time monitoring and detection of abnormal heart rhythms, specifically through acquisition of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals for extended periods (24 to 48 hours) have been sought by many researchers. Abnormal ECG signals could appear any time in the day during regular patient activities. Spurious noise associated with motion and muscular contraction is usually coupled with the acquired ECG signal. Cancelling muscle contraction and motion artifacts from real time ECG signals is extremely vital for accurate ECG signal classification for analysis by trained medical specialists. The intent of this research was to develop a bi-electrode wireless acquisition system that captured and transmitted ECG signals and motion acceleration information to a host computer system for data capture and analysis. The designed wireless ECG system includes a 3-axis micro electromechanical (MEMS) accelerometer for motion detection.

Effective and powerful methods for denoising real electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are important for wearable sensors and devices. Deep Learning (DL) models have been used extensively in image processing and other domains with great success but only very recently have been used in processing ECG signals. This paper presents several DL models namely Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) together with the more conventional filtering methods (low pass filtering, high pass filtering, Notch filtering) and the standard wavelet-based technique for denoising EEG signals. These methods are trained, tested and evaluated on different synthetic and real ECG datasets taken from the MIT PhysioNet database and for different simulation conditions (i.e. various lengths of the ECG signals, single or multiple records). The results show the CNN model is a performant model that can be used for off-line denoising ECG applications where it is satisfactory to train on a clean part of an ECG signal from an ECG record, and then to test on the same ECG signal, which would have some high level of noise added to it. However, for real-time applications or near-real time applications, this task becomes more cumbersome, as the clean part of an ECG signal is very probable to be very limited in size. Therefore the solution put forth in this work is to train a CNN model on 1 second ECG noisy artificial multiple heartbeat data (i.e. ECG at effort), which was generated in a first instance based on few sequences of real signal heartbeat ECG data (i.e. ECG at rest). Afterwards it would be possible to use the trained CNN model in real life situations to denoise the ECG signal.

A recent trend in the field of biometrics is ECG-based, where electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are used as input to the biometric system. Previous work has shown that ECG has a good potential, which can be used alone as a biometric parameter or in combination with some other parameters for greater accuracy, due to its main key properties. This paper presents a study on the applicability of ECG signals in securing Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) communications. We study the permanence and the distinctiveness properties of ECG signals on 10 random patients. The Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) are applied on the ECG signals obtained from MIT-BIH Normal Synus Rhythm (nsrdb) public database. The experimental results are presented, which exhibit that ECG signal can be utilized properly to achieve better security performance under the stringent constraints of WBAN sensors. Thus, it is believed that the system can naturally secure the information transmission within WBAN, where other techniques use hardware and software to achieve the same purpose.

The quest for improved diagnosis and treatment in home health care models has led to the development of wearable medical devices for remote vital signs monitoring. An accurate signal and a high diagnostic yield are critical for the cost-effectiveness of wearable health care monitoring systems and their widespread application in resource-constrained environments. Despite technological advances, the information acquired by these devices can be contaminated by motion artifacts (MA) leading to misdiagnosis or repeated procedures with increases in associated costs. This makes it necessary to develop methods to improve the quality of the signal acquired by these devices. We aimed to present a novel method for electrocardiogram (ECG) signal denoising to reduce MA. We aimed to analyze the method's performance and to compare its performance to that of existing approaches. We present the novel Redundant denoising Independent Component Analysis method for ECG signal denoising based on the redundant and simultaneous acquisition of ECG signals and movement information, multichannel processing, and performance assessment considering the information contained in the signal waveform. The method is based on data including ECG signals from the patient's chest and back, the acquisition of triaxial movement signals from inertial measurement units, a reference signal synthesized from an autoregressive model, and the separation of interest and noise sources through multichannel independent component analysis. The proposed method significantly reduced MA, showing better performance and introducing a smaller distortion in the interest signal compared with other methods. Finally, the performance of the proposed method was compared to that of wavelet shrinkage and wavelet independent component analysis through the assessment of signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic time warping, and a proposed index based on the signal waveform evaluation with an ensemble average ECG. Our novel ECG denoising method is a contribution to converting wearable devices into medical monitoring tools that can be used to support the remote diagnosis and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. A more accurate signal substantially improves the diagnostic yield of wearable devices. A better yield improves the devices' cost-effectiveness and contributes to their widespread application.

Heart disease is still a heavy hitter on the list of leading causes of death around the globe, so getting ahead of the game with early and accurate predictions is crucial for effective treatment. Traditional diagnostic systems often put all their eggs in one basket, relying solely on clinical data or electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. This one-track approach can really throw a wrench in the works, limiting their predictive power. To tackle this head-on, we suggest a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Heart Disease Prediction Using Multi-Modal Clinical and ECG Data, which weaves together cutting-edge neural architectures, attention mechanisms, and ensemble strategies to boost performance and clarity.The framework gets the ball rolling by preprocessing UCI Cleveland clinical features with a bit of normalization and encoding, while ECG signals are put through the wringer with noise removal, segmentation, and scaling. Clinical data are shaped using machine learning classifiers and ANN, while ECG features are pulled together with CNN, BiLSTM, and Transformer layers to snag local, temporal, and contextual insights. A Graph Neural Network (GNN) weaves together the threads of clinical and ECG features, while a cross-attention fusion module dances to the rhythm of dynamically aligning and prioritizing the key features from both modalities. Predictions are cooked up using a stacked ensemble classifier, and model interpretability is kept in the clear through SHAP values, attention heatmaps, and graph attention visualization.The experimental evaluation reveals that the proposed method takes the cake, leaving the baseline models in the dust. Our framework hit the nail on the head with a whopping 94.8% accuracy, 93.5% precision, 95.1% recall, and 94.3% F1-score, leaving traditional machine learning in the dust at a mere 86.5%, and unimodal deep learning methods like CNN-BiLSTM and Transformer trailing behind at 89.7% and 90.4%, respectively. Talk about raising the bar!To wrap it all up, the suggested hybrid method hits the nail on the head by blending structured clinical data with ECG signals, providing top-notch predictive accuracy and clarity that’s second to none. This positions it as a strong contender for practical clinical decision support and the early detection of cardiovascular disease. Keywords: Heart Disease Prediction, Hybrid Deep Learning, Multi-Modal Fusion, ECG Signals, Cross-Attention, Graph Neural Network, Explainable AI,

Signal estimation from functional magnetic resonance imaging data (fMRI) is a difficult and challenging task that involves carefully chosen models that can be validated by domain experts. Blind source separation (BSS) techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), and tensor decomposition have been proposed for estimating the task-fMRI signals. However, few studies have investigated their efficacy for classifying different tasks. This paper proposes yet another novel method to validate the signal estimation using predictive performance of the methods. Three commonly used BSS techniques are used for estimating signals (spatio-temporal maps) from task-fMRI. The dataset (consisting of 4 tasks) is taken from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The extracted temporal signals are used to train a classifier that classifies two different tasks. For a binary classification, a Constrained-PARAFAC tensor decomposition achieves 92% accuracy for differentiating gambling vs. relational tasks. In addition, results for other binary task classifications are also presented. Overall, the proposed Constrained-PARAFAC performs better in prediction performance compared to PCA and ICA.

Fast fixed-point independent vector analysis algorithms for convolutive blind source separation

Analysis of time-evolving data is crucial to understand the functioning of dynamic systems such as the brain. For instance, analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected during a task may reveal spatial regions of interest, and how they evolve during the task. However, capturing underlying spatial patterns as well as their change in time is challenging. The traditional approach in fMRI data analysis is to assume that underlying spatial regions of interest are static. In this article, using fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) as an effective way to summarize the variability in fMRI data collected during a task, we arrange time-evolving fMRI data as a subjects by voxels by time windows tensor, and analyze the tensor using a tensor factorization-based approach called a PARAFAC2 model to reveal spatial dynamics. The PARAFAC2 model jointly analyzes data from multiple time windows revealing subject-mode patterns, evolving spatial regions (also referred to as networks) and temporal patterns. We compare the PARAFAC2 model with matrix factorization-based approaches relying on independent components, namely, joint independent component analysis (ICA) and independent vector analysis (IVA), commonly used in neuroimaging data analysis. We assess the performance of the methods in terms of capturing evolving networks through extensive numerical experiments demonstrating their modeling assumptions. In particular, we show that (i) PARAFAC2 provides a compact representation in all modes, i.e., subjects, time, and voxels, revealing temporal patterns as well as evolving spatial networks, (ii) joint ICA is as effective as PARAFAC2 in terms of revealing evolving networks but does not reveal temporal patterns, (iii) IVA's performance depends on sample size, data distribution and covariance structure of underlying networks. When these assumptions are satisfied, IVA is as accurate as the other methods, (iv) when subject-mode patterns differ from one time window to another, IVA is the most accurate. Furthermore, we analyze real fMRI data collected during a sensory motor task, and demonstrate that a component indicating statistically significant group difference between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls is captured, which includes primary and secondary motor regions, cerebellum, and temporal lobe, revealing a meaningful spatial map and its temporal change.

Conventional Blind Source Separation (BSS) techniques are computationally complex. This is due to the calculation of the demixing matrix for the entire signal or due to the frequent update of the demixing matrix at every time frame index, making them impractical to use in many real-time applications. In this paper, a robust, neural network based two-microphone sound source localization method is used as a criterion to enhance the efficiency of the Independent Vector Analysis (IVA), a BSS method. IVA is used to separate speech and noise sources which are convolutedly mixed. The practical usability of the proposed method is proved by implementing it on a smartphone to separate speech and noise in real-world scenarios for hearing-aid applications. The experimental results with objective and subjective tests reveal the usefulness of the developed method for real-world applications.