Heart beat detection in multimodal data using automatic relevant signal detection

Accurate R peak detection in the electrocardiogram (ECG) is a well-known and highly explored problem in biomedical signal processing. Although a lot of progress has been made in this area, current methods are still insufficient in the presence of extreme noise and/or artifacts such as loose electrodes. Often, however, not only the ECG is recorded, but multiple signals are simultaneously acquired from the patient. Several of these signals, such as blood pressure, can help to improve the heart beat detection. These signals of interest can be detected automatically by analyzing their power spectral density or by using the available signal type identifiers. Individual peaks from the signals of interest are combined using majority voting, heart beat location estimation and Hjorth's mobility of the resulting RR intervals. Both multimodal algorithms showed significant increases in performance of up to 8.65% for noisy multimodal datasets compared to when only the ECG signal is used. A maximal performance of 90.02% was obtained on the hidden test set of the Physionet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2014: Robust Detection of Heart Beats in Multimodal Data.