Application of projection pursuit based robust principal component analysis to ECG enhancement

The paper presents an application of principal component analysis (PCA) to ECG processing. For this purpose the ECG beats are time-aligned and stored in the columns of an auxiliary matrix. The matrix, considered as a set of multidimensional variables, undergoes PCA. Reconstruction of the respective columns on the basis of a low dimensional principal subspace leads to the enhancement of the stored ECG beats. A few modifications of this classical approach to ECG signal filtering by means of a multivariate analysis are introduced. The first one is based on replacing the classical PCA by its robust extension. The second consists in replacing the analysis of the whole synchronized beats by the analysis of shorter signal segments. This creates the background for the third modification, which introduces the concept of variable dimensions of the subspaces corresponding to different parts of ECG beats. The experiments performed show that introduction of the respective modifications significantly improves the classical approach to ECG processing by application of principal component analysis.