Enhancement of ECG using Empirical Mode Decomposition

Abstract

This paper presents a new method based on empirical mode decomposition for enhancement of ECG (Electrocardiogram) signals. ECG signal has been widely used for diagnosis purposes of heart diseases. So a good quality ECG free from artifacts is required by physicians to easily and accurately diagnosis the physiological and pathological phenomena. However ECG recordings are often corrupted by artifacts that does not allow accurate diagnosis of heart conditions. So these artifacts need to be eliminated from the ECG for better clinical evaluation. Two dominant artifacts present in ECG recordings are Power line interference and Baseline Wander. In this paper we used empirical mode decomposition for denoising of Power line interference and Baseline Wander. We have used MIT- BIH arrhythmia and Fantasia database to validate the efficiency of method. Simulations were carried out in MATLAB environment. The results shows that this method is able to remove both Power line interference and Baseline Wander with minimum distortion just in a single step.