4 research outputs found
Role of independent component analysis in intelligent ECG signal processing
The Electrocardiogram (ECG) reflects the activities and the attributes of the human heart and reveals very important hidden information in its structure. The information is extracted by means of ECG signal analysis to gain insights that are very crucial in explaining and identifying various pathological conditions. The feature extraction process can be accomplished directly by an expert through, visual inspection of ECGs printed on paper or displayed on a screen. However, the complexity and the time taken for the ECG signals to be visually inspected and manually analysed means that it‟s a very tedious task thus yielding limited descriptions. In addition, a manual ECG analysis is always prone to errors: human oversights. Moreover ECG signal processing has become a prevalent and effective tool for research and clinical practices. A typical computer based ECG analysis system includes a signal preprocessing, beats detection and feature extraction stages, followed by classification.Automatic identification of arrhythmias from the ECG is one important biomedical application of pattern recognition. This thesis focuses on ECG signal processing using Independent Component Analysis (ICA), which has received increasing attention as a signal conditioning and feature extraction technique for biomedical application. Long term ECG monitoring is often required to reliably identify the arrhythmia. Motion induced artefacts are particularly common in ambulatory and Holter recordings, which are difficult to remove with conventional filters due to their similarity to the shape of ectopic xiiibeats. Feature selection has always been an important step towards more accurate, reliable and speedy pattern recognition. Better feature spaces are also sought after in ECG pattern recognition applications. Two new algorithms are proposed, developed and validated in this thesis, one for removing non-trivial noises in ECGs using the ICA and the other deploys the ICA extracted features to improve recognition of arrhythmias. Firstly, independent component analysis has been studiedand found effective in this PhD project to separate out motion induced artefacts in ECGs, the independent component corresponding to noise is then removed from the ECG according to kurtosis and correlation measurement.The second algorithm has been developed for ECG feature extraction, in which the independent component analysis has been used to obtain a set of features, or basis functions of the ECG signals generated hypothetically by different parts of the heart during the normal and arrhythmic cardiac cycle. ECGs are then classified based on the basis functions along with other time domain features. The selection of the appropriate feature set for classifier has been found important for better performance and quicker response. Artificial neural networks based pattern recognition engines are used to perform final classification to measure the performance of ICA extracted features and effectiveness of the ICA based artefacts reduction algorithm.The motion artefacts are effectively removed from the ECG signal which is shown by beat detection on noisy and cleaned ECG signals after ICA processing. Using the ICA extracted feature sets classification of ECG arrhythmia into eight classes with fewer independent components and very high classification accuracy is achieved
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ECG analysis and classification using CSVM, MSVM and SIMCA classifiers
Reliable ECG classification can potentially lead to better detection methods and increase
accurate diagnosis of arrhythmia, thus improving quality of care. This thesis investigated the
use of two novel classification algorithms: CSVM and SIMCA, and assessed their
performance in classifying ECG beats. The project aimed to introduce a new way to
interactively support patient care in and out of the hospital and develop new classification
algorithms for arrhythmia detection and diagnosis. Wave (P-QRS-T) detection was performed
using the WFDB Software Package and multiresolution wavelets. Fourier and PCs were
selected as time-frequency features in the ECG signal; these provided the input to the
classifiers in the form of DFT and PCA coefficients. ECG beat classification was performed
using binary SVM. MSVM, CSVM, and SIMCA; these were subsequently used for
simultaneously classifying either four or six types of cardiac conditions. Binary SVM
classification with 100% accuracy was achieved when applied on feature-reduced ECG
signals from well-established databases using PCA. The CSVM algorithm and MSVM were
used to classify four ECG beat types: NORMAL, PVC, APC, and FUSION or PFUS; these
were from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database (precordial lead group and limb lead II).
Different numbers of Fourier coefficients were considered in order to identify the optimal
number of features to be presented to the classifier. SMO was used to compute hyper-plane
parameters and threshold values for both MSVM and CSVM during the classifier training
phase. The best classification accuracy was achieved using fifty Fourier coefficients. With the
new CSVM classifier framework, accuracies of 99%, 100%, 98%, and 99% were obtained
using datasets from one, two, three, and four precordial leads, respectively. In addition, using
CSVM it was possible to successfully classify four types of ECG beat signals extracted from
limb lead simultaneously with 97% accuracy, a significant improvement on the 83% accuracy
achieved using the MSVM classification model. In addition, further analysis of the following
four beat types was made: NORMAL, PVC, SVPB, and FUSION. These signals were
obtained from the European ST-T Database. Accuracies between 86% and 94% were obtained
for MSVM and CSVM classification, respectively, using 100 Fourier coefficients for
reconstructing individual ECG beats. Further analysis presented an effective ECG arrhythmia
classification scheme consisting of PCA as a feature reduction method and a SIMCA
classifier to differentiate between either four or six different types of arrhythmia. In separate
studies, six and four types of beats (including NORMAL, PVC, APC, RBBB, LBBB, and
FUSION beats) with time domain features were extracted from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia
database and the St Petersburg INCART 12-lead Arrhythmia Database (incartdb) respectively.
Between 10 and 30 PCs, coefficients were selected for reconstructing individual ECG beats in
the feature selection phase. The average classification accuracy of the proposed scheme was
98.61% and 97.78 % using the limb lead and precordial lead datasets, respectively. In addition,
using MSVM and SIMCA classifiers with four ECG beat types achieved an average
classification accuracy of 76.83% and 98.33% respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed
algorithms was finally confirmed by successfully classifying both the six beat and four beat
types of signal respectively with a high accuracy ratio