Noise reduction in CHD patients by means of BSS

In 1992, Brockmeier et al. showed the difference in magnetocardiography (MCG)-detected field distribution generated by the heart at rest and under stress. Unfortunately, routinely recorded magnetocardiograms (MCGs) are corrupted by different types of artifacts, especially during stress. This work addressed the problem of optimizing artifacts removing and improving the signal to noise ratio (SNR) in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) under pharmacological stress MCG (PSMCG) using a technique of Blind Source Separation (BSS) called TDSEP. Techniques based on simple statistical parameters were proposed to identify the cardiac related component among the unmixed data. The presented results showed that BSS could detect and remove a variety of noise and artifact sources in PSMCG, allowing the use in clinical applications.