Nonlocal Means Denoising of ECG Signals

• Published in: IEEE transactions on biomedical engineering Vol. 59; no. 9; pp. 2383 - 2386
• Main Authors: Tracey, Brian H., Miller, Eric L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.09.2012; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Biological and medical sciences; Computer Simulation; Computerized, statistical medical data processing and models in biomedicine; Databases, Factual; Denoising; Detection, estimation, filtering, equalization, prediction; Distortion; ECG; Electrocardiography; Electrocardiography - methods; Electrocardiography. Vectocardiography; Electrodiagnosis. Electric activity recording; Exact sciences and technology; Humans; Information, signal and communications theory; Investigative techniques, diagnostic techniques (general aspects); Measurement; Medical management aid. Diagnosis aid; Medical sciences; Noise reduction; nonlocal means; Signal and communications theory; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; Signal to noise ratio; Signal, noise; Telecommunications and information theory; Electrodiagnosis; Noise reduction; nonlocal means; Electrocardiography; Signal processing; ECG; Biomedical engineering; Denoising
• ISSN: 0018-9294; 1558-2531
• DOI: 10.1109/TBME.2012.2208964

Patch-based methods have attracted significant attention in recent years within the field of image processing for a variety of problems including denoising, inpainting, and super-resolution interpolation. Despite their prevalence for processing 2-D signals, they have received little attention in the 1-D signal processing literature. In this letter, we explore application of one such method, the nonlocal means (NLM) approach, to the denoising of biomedical signals. Using ECG as an example, we demonstrate that a straightforward NLM-based denoising scheme provides signal-to-noise ratio improvements very similar to state of the art wavelet-based methods, while giving \sim 3 \times or greater reduction in metrics measuring distortion of the denoised waveform.