Abstract:

According to the characteristics of energy distribution of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, a novel QRS complex detection scheme based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is proposed in the paper. The EMD method decomposes the ECG signal into a set of oscillatory components called intrinsic mode functions (IMFs).
Energy contained in each IMF is then calculated and normalized. According to the energy distribution, interference caused by baseline bias, baseline wander and high T wave is detected and restrained. A simple adaptive threshold is chosen to detect the QRS complex. Several measures for avoiding false positive and false
negative detections are taken. Performance of the method was tested using all 48 records from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. An average detection rate of 99.91\% was achieved, showing good reliability of the proposed detector.

Key words: ECG signal, , QRS complex, , empirical mode decomposition (EMD), , intrinsic mode functions (IMFs)