Removal of Baseline Wander Noise from Electrocardiogram (ECG) using Fifth-order Spline Interpolation

• Main Authors: John A. OJO, Temilade B. ADETOYI, Solomon A. ADENIRAN
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava 2016-10-01
• Series: Journal of Applied Computer Science & Mathematics
• Subjects: Baseline wander; electrocardiogram; electrocardiography; quintic spline interpolation
• Online Access: http://jacsm.ro/view/?pid=22_1
• ISSN: 2066-4273; 2066-3129

Baseline wandering can mask some important features of the Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal hence it is desirable to remove this noise for proper analysis and display of the ECG signal. This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of spline interpolation and linear phase FIR filtering methods to remove this noise. Spline interpolation method requires the QRS waves to be first detected and fifth-order (quintic) interpolation technique applied to determine the smoothest curve joining several QRS points. Filtering of the ECG baseline wander was performed by using the difference between the estimated baseline wander and the noisy ECG signal. ECG signals from the MIT-BIT arrhythmia database was used to test the system, while the technique was implemented in MATLAB. The performance of the system was evaluated using Average Power (AP) after filtering, Mean Square Error (MSE) and the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). The quintic spline interpolation gave the best performance in terms of AP, MSE and SNR when compared with linear phase filtering and cubic (3rd-order) spline interpolation methods.