Application of a wavelet adaptive filter to minimise distortion of the ST-segment.

A wavelet adaptive filter (WAF) for the removal of baseline wandering in ECG signals is described. The WAF consists of two parts. The first part is a wavelet transform that decomposes the ECG signal into seven frequency bands using Vaidyanathan-Hoang wavelets. The second part is an adaptive filter that uses the signal of the seventh lowest-frequency band among the wavelet transformed signals as primary input and a constant as reference input. To evaluate the performance of the WAF, two baseline wandering elimination filters are used, a commercial standard filter with a cutoff frequency of 0.5 Hz and a general adaptive filter. The MIT/BIH database and the European ST-T database are used for the evaluation. The WAF performs better in the average power of eliminated noise than the standard filter and adaptive filter. Furthermore, it shows a lower ST-segment distortion than the standard filter and the adaptive filter.