Impedance cardiography signal denoising using discrete wavelet transform.

Impedance cardiography (ICG) is a non-invasive technique for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. In the acquisition procedure, the ICG signal is often affected by several kinds of noise which distort the determination of the hemodynamic parameters. Therefore, doctors cannot recognize ICG waveform correctly and the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases became inaccurate. The aim of this work is to choose the most suitable method for denoising the ICG signal. Indeed, different wavelet families are used to denoise the ICG signal. The Haar, Daubechies (db2, db4, db6, and db8), Symlet (sym2, sym4, sym6, sym8) and Coiflet (coif2, coif3, coif4, coif5) wavelet families are tested and evaluated in order to select the most suitable denoising method. The wavelet family with best performance is compared with two denoising methods: one based on Savitzky-Golay filtering and the other based on median filtering. Each method is evaluated by means of the signal to noise ratio (SNR), the root mean square error (RMSE) and the percent difference root mean square (PRD). The results show that the Daubechies wavelet family (db8) has superior performance on noise reduction in comparison to other methods.