Tremor suppression in ECG

BackgroundElectrocardiogram recordings are very often contaminated by high-frequency noise usually power-line interference and EMG disturbances (tremor). Specific method for interference cancellation without affecting the proper ECG components, called subtraction procedure, was developed some two decades ago. Filtering out the tremor remains a priori partially successful since it has a relatively wide spectrum, which overlaps the useful ECG frequency band.MethodThe proposed method for tremor suppression implements the following three procedures. Contaminated ECG signals are subjected to moving averaging (comb filter with linear phase characteristic) with first zero set at 50 Hz to suppress tremor and PL interference simultaneously. The reduced peaks of QRS complexes and other relatively high and steep ECG waves are then restored by an introduced by us procedure called linearly-angular, so that the useful high frequency components are preserved in the range specified by the embedded in the ECG instrument filter, usually up to 125 Hz. Finally, a Savitzky-Golay smoothing filter is applied for supplementary tremor suppression outside the QRS complexes.ResultsThe results obtained show a low level of the residual EMG disturbances together with negligible distortion of the wave shapes regardless of rhythm and morphology changes.