Robust heartbeat detection using multimodal recordings and ECG quality assessment with signal amplitudes dispersion

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a bioelectric signal which represents heart's electrical activity graphically. This bioelectric signal is subject of lots of researches and so many algorithms are designed for extracting lots of clinically important parameters from it. Most of these parameters can be measured by detecting R peak of the QRS complex in ECG signal, but when ECG signal is corrupted by different kinds of noise and artifacts, such as electromyogram (EMG) from muscles, power line interference, motion artifacts and changes in electrode-skin interface, detection of R peaks becomes hard or impossible for algorithms which are designed for heart beat detection on ECG signal. In modern patient monitoring devices often not only one ECG signal is recorded but also so many other biological signals are simultaneously recorded from the patient which some of them, such as blood pressure (BP), are containing useful information about the heart activity which could be very helpful in making the heart beat detection more robust.

In this study, a new method is introduced for distinguishing noise free segments of ECG from noisy segments that uses samples amplitudes dispersion with an adaptive threshold for variance of samples amplitude and a method which uses compatibility of detected beats in ECG and some of other signals which are related to the heart activity such as BP, arterial pressure (ART) and pulmonary artery pressure (PAP). A prioritization is applied in other pulsatile signals based on the amplitude and clarity of peaks on them, and a fusion strategy is employed for segments on which ECG is noisy and other available signals in the data, which contain peaks corresponding to R peak of the ECG, are scored in a three steps scoring function.

The final scores achieved by the proposed algorithm in terms of average sensitivity, positive predictive value, accuracy and F1 measure on the database which is freely available in Physionet Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2014 are respectively 95.47%, 96.03%, 93.11% and 95.62%.

The results show the outperformance of the proposed method against other recently published works.