A novel T wave cancellation method based on MAP estimation for P wave extraction

P wave and T wave in human-body electrocardiogram (ECG) signals often fuse together when atrial premature contract (APC) occurs. P waves within the fused signals are valuable for the measurement of P wave parameters as well as diagnosis of supra-ventricular arrhythmias. However, the problem of extracting P wave from the fused signals is seldom addressed. In this study, a novel T wave cancellation method for P wave extraction based on maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation is proposed. In order to accurately cancel the T wave within the fused signal, T wave and the timing point of T wave peak are estimated simultaneously. The estimated timing point of T wave peak is used as alignment reference point for T wave subtraction. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperform the traditional T wave cancellation method in terms of both normalized mean square error and cross-correlation index. The results for real ECGs with APC demonstrate that the extracted P waves using the proposed method are more similar to the non-overlapping P waves in terms of morphology than the ones using the traditional T wave cancellation method.