Biomedical applications of DSP:

Digital Signal Processing techniques are used in the biomedical

field for monitoring, diagnosis process and analysis of
abnormalities in the body:
The major applications are:
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.

Removal of artefacts
Electrocardiogram (ECG)
Electroencephalogram (EEG)
Phonocardiogram (PCG)
Speech Processing

Many applications of DSP in biomedicine involve signal

enhancement and the extraction of features of clinical interest.
The need for signal enhancement arises from problems of
artefacts or signal enhancement which is very common in
biomedicine
Artefacts are caused by sources both external (e.g. mains
supply) and internal (e.g. body movements).Artefacts
reduce the clinical usefulness of biomedical signals.

I.

Removal of Artefacts:
As almost all bio signals are extremely week in nature and
often buried in noise; so removal of artefacts is a very
important in biomedical field.
The amplitude of biomedical signals is usually in the range
of micro Volts to mili Volts. Hence sophisticated
instrumentation and data acquisition techniques are
required to acquire these signals.
Different noises like random noise .power line,
physiological interferences and so on are induced in bio
signal.

 Selection of a filter is crucial because these signals contain

noise. Digital filters are chosen depending on the type of
bio signal.
Different types of filters used are:
a) Time Domain Filters
b) Frequency Domain Filters
c) Optimal Filters
d) Adaptive Filters
A. Time Domain Filters:
The synchronised averaging and moving averaging
filters deal noises due to no distinguishable spectral
pattern very efficiently. These filters are used to remove
noises due to patient movement or electrode
misalignment in ECG.
B. Frequency Domain Filters
Frequency domain filters are easiest to implement,
they provide low pass, high pass, band reject
characteristics. Noise due to power line interference can
be by using frequency domain filters like notch filters.
C. Optimal Filters
Whenever the statistical characteristics of bio signal
and noise process are known Wiener filters are used. The
output of Wiener filter is much useful and optimised over
conventional filters.
D. Adaptive Filters
Adaptive filters are used when the spectral content of
the noises and signal overlap.

II.

Electrocardiogram (ECG):
Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a technique to determine
the heart beat/pulse rate of a human in order to diagnose
blood pressure. The digital signal processing plays very
vital role in extraction of Foetal ECG.

Extraction of Foetal ECG by Adaptive Cancellation of

Maternal ECG:
Maternal ECG is also being extracted and added
along with the desired foetal ECG. While the combined
ECG of mother foetus is obtained from single abdomen
lead, the maternal ECG is also obtained separately using
multiple (four) chest electrodes.
The maternal cardiac vector is projected in different ways
on the individual electrodes. Hence, the characteristics of
the maternal ECG from the abdominal leads would be
different from the obtained from chest leads.
Maternal ECG obtained from chest leads are given to
adaptive filters as reference.
Then the maternal ECG is extracted from the combined
ECG to get foetal ECG.
Like adult ECG, normal foetal ECG is characterised by five
peaks and valleys labelled with successive letters of
alphabets P, Q, R, S and T.

Thus the ECG is said to consist of the P wave, QRS

complex and T wave as shown below.

Figure 1 The Electrocardiogram

The reciprocal of the heart period, the time interval

between R-to R peaks (in milliseconds) multiplied by
60000 give instantaneous heart rate.
In practice to measure the foetal heart rate a suitable
algorithm is employed to detect in hardware or software,
successive QRS complex and from these to calculate R to
R intervals.
Most QRS detection methods assume that the shape of the
foetal QRS complex is known as priori, but its time of
occurrence is unknown, this is due to variable QRS
complex from patient to patient.
Thus by comparing the ECG signal against a known
representative QRS template the locations of QRS complex
in the ECG can be determined based on some measure of
similarity.
A fundamental problem in reliable QRS detection of the
QRS complex is signal degradation due to movement by
mother, misalignment of electrodes.
A general lock diagram for measurement of foetal ECG is
shown below.

Figure 2 Measurement of Foetal ECG

QRS Detection methods

A general block diagram of QRS detection is as shown.

Figure 3 QRS complex detection from raw ECG

The raw ECG data is first pre-processed to reduce effects

of noise.
The pre-processed data samples are fed into a buffer, the
oldest data point is removed and the content of the buffer
compared with a QRS template in QRS detection.

 The output of the QRS dete3ctor is then threshold. If this

output exceeds the threshold value then a QRS is said to
be occurred.