Noise Cancellation from Vibrocardiographic Signals Based on the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition

Vibrocardiographic (VCG) signals are the cardiac vibration measured at the chest surface. These signals can contain useful information for diagnosing cardiac conditions but are often contaminated by noise. Although band-pass and adaptive filters were used for noise removal from similar signals, the utility of ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) for filtering VCG was not previously investigated. In this study, an EEMD-based filter was proposed and tested. The filtering scheme first decomposed the VCG waveform into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMF) then utilized the partial sum of IMFs to remove white noise that was added to simulated VCG signals. To measure the filter effectiveness, the normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE) between the clean (i.e., before adding noise) and filtered signals was calculated for signal-to-noise ratios ranging from 1 to 20 dB. The EEMD-based filter performance was also compared with traditional methods such as Wiener filter. This comparison suggested that EEMD-based filter outperformed the Wiener filter in noise removal from simulated VCG. These results also suggested that EEMD may be utilized for white noise removal from actual VCG signals. Further investigations are warranted to study the relation between IMFs and different types of noise, which can enhance the effectiveness of EEMD-based filters in removing these noise types from actual VCG signals.