Efficient reduction of PLI in ECG signal using new variable step size least mean fourth adaptive algorithm

It is very important in remote cardiac diagnosis to extract pure ECG signal from the contaminated recordings of the signal. When recording the ECG signal in the laboratory, the signal is affected by numerous artifacts. Varies artifacts generally degrades the signal quality are PLI, EM, MA and EM. In addition to these, the channel noise also added when transmitting signal from remote location to diagnosis center for analyzing the signal. There are several approaches are used to reduce the noise present in the ECG signal. From the literature it is proven that compared to non adaptive filters, adaptive filters play vital role to trace the random changes in the corrupted signals. In this paper, we proposed efficient Variable step size leaky least mean fourth algorithm and its sign versions for reducing the complexity. These algorithms shows that it gives low steady state error due to least mean fourth and fast convergence rate that is it tracks the input signal quickly because of its variable step size is high at initial iterations of signal compared to the LMS algorithm. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using SNR, frequency spectrum, MSE, misadjustment and convergence characteristics

Real time perfusion and oxygenation monitoring in an implantable optical sensor

Simultaneous blood perfusion and oxygenation monitoring is crucial for patients undergoing a transplant procedure. This becomes of great importance during the surgical recovery period of a transplant procedure when uncorrected loss of perfusion or reduction in oxygen saturation can result in patient death. Pulse oximeters are standard monitoring devices which are used to obtain the perfusion level and oxygen saturation using the optical absorption properties of hemoglobin. However, in cases of varying perfusion due to hemorrhage, blood clot or acute blockage, the oxygenation results obtained from traditional pulse oximeters are erroneous due to a sudden drop in signal strength. The long term goal of the project is to devise an implantable optical sensor which is able to perform better than the traditional pulse oximeters with changing perfusion and function as a local warning for sudden blood perfusion and oxygenation loss. In this work, an optical sensor based on a pulse oximeter with an additional source at 810nm wavelength has been developed for in situ monitoring of transplant organs. An algorithm has been designed to separate perfusion and oxygenation signals from the composite signal obtained from the three source pulse oximetry-based sensor. The algorithm uses 810nm reference signals and an adaptive filtering routine to separate the two signals which occur at the same frequency. The algorithm is initially applied to model data and its effectiveness is further tested using in vitro and in vivo data sets to quantify its ability to separate the signals of interest. The entire process is done in real time in conjunction with the autocorrelation-based time domain technique. This time domain technique uses digital filtering and autocorrelation to extract peak height information and generate an amplitude measurement and has shown to perform better than the traditional fast Fourier transform (FFT) for semi-periodic signals, such as those derived from heart monitoring. In particular, in this paper it is shown that the two approaches produce comparable results for periodic in vitro perfusion signals. However, when used on semi periodic, simulated, perfusion signals and in vivo data generated from an optical perfusion sensor the autocorrelation approach clearly (Standard Error, SE = 0.03) outperforms the FFT-based analysis (Standard Error, SE = 0.62)

Application of Higher-Order Statistics and Subspace-Based Techniques to the Analysis and Diagnosis of Electrocardiogram Signals

The first and main contribution of this research work is the higher-order statistics (HOS)-based non-linear analysis and subsequent diagnosis of abnormal electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, particularly myocardial ischaemia. In the time domain; the second-, third-, and the fourth-order cumulants have been used in the analysis. In the frequency domain; up to the tenth-order polyspectra have been exploited. This HOS-based analysis of normal and ischaemic electrocardiogram signals has led to the identification of certain key discriminant features for the two physiological states of the heart. These features are then fed to different backpropagation-based multiple layer perceptrons for classification. The second contribution is a proposed new methodology to discriminate patients with angina pectoris or with old myocardial infarction (MI) during the first 60 seconds of stress test (or in some cases using rest ECG). It is based on the pseudo-spectral Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) and has the potential of being highly sensitive diagnostic signal processing tool. The third contribution is the development of a novel higher-order statistics, high-resolution estimator for quadratically coupled frequencies based on subspace spectral estimation. Extensive studies of cumulants, bispectra and bicoherence-squared of normal and ischaemic ECG signals collected from MIT and ST-T European databases has enabled us to see key discriminant features in both the third- and fourth-order cumulant domains. In the frequency domain, the polyspectral study has been extended to the lOth-order poly spectra. By calculating one-dimensional polyspectrum slices using an algorithm developed by Zhou and Giannakis (1995) a considerable reduction in the CPU time has been achieved. Furthermore, Zhou’s algorithm has been further extended to estimate the polycoherency slices which are used to characterise non-linearities in normal and ischaemic ECG signals. An important finding in this thesis is the decrease of the order of non-linearity representing the electrocardiogram signals of ischaemic patients. This thesis also includes the results of a pilot study involving eighteen healthy subjects (MIT database) and confirmed that the ECG signal is non-Gaussian, cyclostationary and quasi periodic. Combined spectral and bispectral analysis of the signal revealed that there are unique harmonic characteristics for the P-wave, QRS complex and T-wave and other frequencies due to harmonic interactions. In this work three linear and one non-linear adaptive filtering/predictions techniques have been applied to noisy ECG signals and their respective performances appraised. It is shown that the Kalman filter gives the best mean-square error MSE error but its comparatively long execution time and problems arising from ill-conditioning of the state-error covariance matrix render it of limited use in ECG applications. It is also shown that the LMS-based quadratic and cubic Volterra filters are the most superior for the ECG signal prediction. For ECG classifications; three multi-layer perceptrons employing back-propagation and modified back-propagation algorithms, and using two sets from the higher-order most discriminant features as their inputs, have yielded fairly high classification rates

Ultra-high-speed imaging of bubbles interacting with cells and tissue

Ultrasound contrast microbubbles are exploited in molecular imaging, where bubbles are directed to target cells and where their high-scattering cross section to ultrasound allows for the detection of pathologies at a molecular level. In therapeutic applications vibrating bubbles close to cells may alter the permeability of cell membranes, and these systems are therefore highly interesting for drug and gene delivery applications using ultrasound. In a more extreme regime bubbles are driven through shock waves to sonoporate or kill cells through intense stresses or jets following inertial bubble collapse. Here, we elucidate some of the underlying mechanisms using the 25-Mfps camera Brandaris128, resolving the bubble dynamics and its interactions with cells. We quantify acoustic microstreaming around oscillating bubbles close to rigid walls and evaluate the shear stresses on nonadherent cells. In a study on the fluid dynamical interaction of cavitation bubbles with adherent cells, we find that the nonspherical collapse of bubbles is responsible for cell detachment. We also visualized the dynamics of vibrating microbubbles in contact with endothelial cells followed by fluorescent imaging of the transport of propidium iodide, used as a membrane integrity probe, into these cells showing a direct correlation between cell deformation and cell membrane permeability