Proceedings ot The First Joint BMES/EMBS Conference Serving Humanity, Advancing Technology Oct. 13.

16, '99, Atlanta, GA, USA

NON-LINEARADAPTIVE PREDICTION BASED
ECG SIGNAL FILTERING
S . M. Szilhgyi
Technical University of Budapest, Dept. of Control Engineering and Information Technology
Pktniny PCter 1/D 1117 Budapest, Hungary
sandor@seeger.fsz.bme .hu
Abstract: A new ECG filtering method is presented. First, This is realized with a self-organizing (SO) adaptive
a pre-filtering is realized, followed by QRS detection. clustering based method [3].
After that the R peaks are localized and the signal is D. Performing optimalfilter using the constructed database
divided into R-R intervals, the original signal can be The optimal filter bases on the pre-filtered signal and the
filtered with less characteristics distortion. This filter is template bank. Let:
based upon a pondered, adaptive, non-linear long-term N 4
prediction method.
Keyworris: ECG signal filtering, QRS detection, long
Xn = P F , ~ - R(n)* C
i=-q
a,,iXn-i +

term prediction, on-line processing

I. INTRODUCTION
An optimal computerized ECG filtering algorithm's The low value of the p~ ( p F <0.35) justifies the need of the
Performance criterion mainly depends On the to collection B, whose m-th element has the maximal correlation
separate the signal from artifacts, and from the amount of
distortion introduced by the filter. Both guidelines are quite value with X n.
hard to evaluate, because the diagnosis is subjective and
depends on the shape of the ECG signal. 111. RESULTS
We used the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database to evaluate
11. MATERIALS AND METHODS the filtering efficiency. The performance of the filtering
This algorithm was performed at the files of MIT-BIH process Was measured With the efficienty increase Of the QRS
database. These files contain two channels, but in this paper detection
onlv the first lead was used.
The ECG filtering algorithm is based on the adaptive long Table I. : The performance of the QRS detection algorithm
and short-term prediction. It consists of the following steps: Record Total beats
number
0 Pre-filtering;
Segmentation into R-R intervals;
### Building up template bank for QRS beats;
###Perform optimal filtering using the constructed 201 1963 16 10
database 203 2982 16 10
A. Pre-filtering
This step is absolutely necessary because of the necessity IV. DISCUSSION
of the accurate R, T and P wave detection for segmentation. Table I demonstrates the superiority of the new, non-
linear adaptive filtering method. The major problem is to
The result of this procedure is i ( n ) obtained by:
guarantee a constantly performant and robust algorithm.

r=-q
The estimation factors ai and bi are obtained by a genetic
algorithm [ 11.
B. Segmentation into R-R intervals
An adaptive neural network [2] with a non-linear hidden
layer detects the R waves. This is an unavoidable step of the
filtering and detection. . [2] Qiuzhen Xue, Yu Hen Hu, W.J. Tompkins - Neutral-Network-Based
C. Construction of the R, T and P waves shape selection
Because the bulk of the signal power is included in the
QRS waves, a template collection is needed.
V. CONCLUSION
The experiments show that this non-linear adaptive filter
can predict the ECG signal better than linear algorithms.
REFERENCES
[I] S.M.Sziliigyi, L. Sziliigyi, L. Diivid, ECG signal compression using
adapive prediction, Proceedings of the 19th ZEEE Conference on
Engineering in medicine and Biology , 19 (1997) 10 1- 104
Adaptive Matched Filtering for QRS Detection, IEEE Trans. Biorned. Eng.,
vol. 39, pp 317-329, APR 1992.
[3] S.M.Sziliigyi, Event recognition, separation and classification from
ECG recordings, Proceedings of the 20th IEEE Conference on Engineering
in medicine and Biology, 20 (1998)

0-7803-5674-8/99/$10.000 1999 IEEE 296