ISSN: 2278 909X International Journal of Advanced Research in Electronics and Communication Engineering (IJARECE) Volume 2, Issue 6, June

e 2013

Morphologically Advanced Method for the Separation of Signals using the CCA-EMD Algorithm
Noelle Susan Joy, D. Sugumar, Dr. P. T. Vanathi

Abstract A combination of various signals as well as noise from the environment is a result when it comes to working with many subjects or multiple working conditions especially in the medical field. These corrupted signals become difficult to study the data retrieved. Hence there is a specific need in utilizing an appropriate algorithm to study these signals on separation while maintaining their basic characteristic property. BSS(Blind Source Separation) has been in long term use when it comes to separation of medical signals. A lot of approaches for BSS have come into existence. Of all the two most significant methods of BSS has been taken here namely CCA and EMD. The main goal is to denoise the corrupted medical signals and further separate them to be studied individually for any medical disorders. The denoising process can be carried out using the methods of wavelet filtering, or adaptive filtering or any other advanced methods of JBSS, ICA, etc.. From an EHG, the heart disorders as well as the the future problems with respect to the growth of the human being can be inferred. The algorithm proposed in this journal is a solution to denoise and separate the EHG signals. To support the algorithm comparison between the other existing methods has been analyzed. JBSS as well as CICA are some of the methods compared to prove that the method suggested is better and successful than any other in terms of signal separation as well as the SIR(Signal to Interference Ratio) values. Index Terms EHG, CCA, EMD, JBSS, CICA I. INTRODUCTION Electro-hysterogram (EHG) is a mixed signal retrieved from the abdomen of a woman recorded during the later stages of pregnancy especially during the 28 weeks of gestation using

Manuscript received March 15, 2013 . Noelle Susan Joy, ECE Department, Karunya University, Coimbatore, India, D. Sugumar, ECE Department, Karunya University, Coimbatore, India, Dr. P.T.Vanathi ,PSG Tech, Coimbatore, India

bipolar electrodes. These EHG signals are useful when it comes to finding out any unusual heart behavior from the heartbeats of the mother or the fetus which in case of labor would guide the doctor to choose a uterine contraction induction or augmentation, a C-section, or other therapies. Furthermore, the fetal heart rate monitoring with respect to the uterine activity, known as cardiotocography, is used as a screening test for timely recognition of fetal distress (e.g. asphyxia) [1] [2]. EHG signals are non-stationary and are polar in nature. Diagnosing the bipolar signals of EHG is not a point as they are stationary in nature. So monopolar EHG are considered. While recording the EHG, the major noise levels in it include the growing fetuss movements, muscle contractions within the uterus, base-line wander, power line interference (PLI),electromyogram (EMG), skin impedance, the electronic and electromagnetic noise from the instruments within as well as outside the abdomen as well ECG of mother and fetus. The EHG is of low frequency and has very low amplitude as compared to contaminating noise sources. Wavelet filtering [3] and JBSS (Joint BSS) have been used successfully on bipolar EHG for removing maternal and fetal ECG as well as electric noises. CICA (Constrained ICA), has also been used in denoising the EEG signals retrieved from the brain [4]. In wavelet filtering the main concept employed is low amplitude and bipolar nature of the EHG signals. This is not what is required in reality as our interest is concerned with the monopolar signals. Also since the signal of interest is of low amplitude the noise range coincides with the same frequency levels. The common frequency range for the EHG is from 0.1 to 1.5 Hz. In addition to this the maternal respiration, maternal heartbeat, fetal respiration are some of the smaller signals that are accounted for in the same frequency range making it a complex signal. And as the noise is in the same frequency bands and is of high amplitude and is sporadic, it cannot be rejected by wavelet filters or the filters used in the JBSS process or cant even match the threshold values in the CICA process. So there are chances that important information is lost by using bipolar signals only. Hence there is a need to go for monopolar signals. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) used in biomedical signal processing involve the analysis of time varying databases such as EMG [5], [6]. There are methods of extracting the fetal ECG from the EHG based on the BAF approach (Blind Adaptive Filtering) where diseases like Arrhythmia can be found out using a moving window [2].This method has out-rated the ICA methods. 632

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ISSN: 2278 909X International Journal of Advanced Research in Electronics and Communication Engineering (IJARECE) Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2013 The artifacts involved with the muscle in the body during recording can be removed too using the BSS technique called as Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) [5][7]. Huang et al introduced the EMD concept which analyzes non stationary and nonlinear signal [8] especially biomedical signals. Using EMD as an artifact removal method is successful in EGG (electrogastrogram) signals, as well as in removing artifacts from ECG signals [9]. A new method introduced, the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) [3], a version of EMD showed better performance than EMD in extracting the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Wavelet Transform (WT) denoising methods could also be good candidates for the second step of the processing presented here. However, in this first attempt EMD was chosen rather than WT methods because of reasons [11]
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II. MATERIALS AND METHODS A. Measurements The FECG measurements are taken from [19], [20].These are already recorded EHG signals from a pregnant woman whose ECG is mixed with the fetal ECG signals within the womb. From the figure below it is seen that the EHG signals taken from the womb are passed through the CCA algorithm to obtain separated noisy mother and fetal signals. On application of the EMD process, external noise is removed to get clear MECG and FECG.
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Fig 2. Mixed ECG signal in MATLAB format B. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) CCA is a process of solving the BSS problem of contrast functions. In ICA (Independent Component Analysis), the estimated sources are considered to be non Gaussian as possible. But in CCA, the sources are forced to be maximally auto correlated and mutually uncorrelated while the mixing matrix is taken to be a square matrix. In CCA the correlation between the variable projections on to the basis vectors are found and later maximized [10]. On considering the observed data matrix P(t) and its delayed version Q(t),their corresponding canonical correlations will be found based on a basis vector or a Canonical Variate. The correlations between the successively extracted canonical variates would be gradually smaller and smaller. The Correlation Coefficients are proportion of correlation between the canonical variates accounted for by the particular variable, P(t) and Q(t). The canonical correlation between P and Q can be calculated by solving these equations: Cpp-1Cpq-1Cqq-1wp=2wp Cqq-1Cqp-1Cpp-1wq=2wq (1) (2)

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Fig 1. Block Diagram showing the CCA-EMD process Fig.1 shows the mixed ECG signal plot. The sampling rate is 250 Hz and T=2500 samples. From fig.1, it is seen in all the seven channels that the strong and slow heart beat signal is that of the mother. The weak and fast rated signals are the heart pulses of the fetus which is seen in the first few channels. The task is to separate out the weak fetal ECG signal. The first five channels shown in the fig. are the signals taken from the abdomen whereas the last two signals have been taken from the thoracic region of the pregnant lady.

where ,canonical correlation coefficient ,as the square root of the Eigen value and Eigen vectors as wp ,wq.. Source signals that are uncorrelated and maximally autocorrelated and an ordered decreasing autocorrelation are obtained in CCA. CCA proves to be robust and its efficiency is tested through the coefficients obtained.Application of CCA includes Speaker Recognition and Image Retrieval.

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ISSN: 2278 909X International Journal of Advanced Research in Electronics and Communication Engineering (IJARECE) Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2013 C. Emperical Mode Decomposition (EMD) EMD is a nonlinear and data driven technique used on non stationary signal decomposition. Here the main idea is to represent a signal as a sum of components, each of them being a Zero-mean AM-FM function. Decomposing a complicated set of data into a finite number of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF), that follows a well behaved Hilbert Transforms. In EMD, Partial Signal Reconstruction by appropriate selection of IMFs is performed and exclusion of those IMFs that contribute to the noise contamination and feature distortion of the signal of choice. Process Steps: 1. Respiration signals were monitored in P,Q axes by measuring the acceleration 2. 3. 4. Application of the EMD on each axis signal
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Application of the spectral criteria on each IMF of 2-axes respiratory signal Evaluation of the EMD based technique was aided by metrics computation (Cross Correlation Coefficients)
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Fig 3. Original ECG signals D. CCA-EMD A combination of the above two methods will be used here. From the results below it is hence proven that the separation of maternal fetal signals are faster and better when compared to the existing methods.

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III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Fig.2 and 3 shows the mixing matrices plotted for applying the BSS approach on the Mixed ECG signals. ECG signals of the original and delayed signals are plotted. Initially the size of the signal is obtained from where it was determined if the signal is a 1-D or 2-D signal. Corresponding mixing matrices A and B are found using the BSS_CCA combined approach Fig. 4 and 5, here the correlation coefficients are calculated and their corresponding variates are found. This helps in easily recognizing the maternal and fetal signals. The plots are made on the basis of checking out the dimensions and they are maximized. The covariates found are then inversed. Once the CCA process is over, the signals are passed to the EMD algorithm where the corresponding IMFs are found using the step by step procedure just like mentioned before.
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In Fig.6 the repeated IMF findings shall in turn reduce the amount of noise and thus make it visible for us to identify the mother and fetal signals which are plotted independently. After the EMD is found, the signal to interference ratio is found and compared with Joint Blind Source Separation (JBSS) and Constrained Independent Component Analysis (CICA).. A total of 2500 samples were taken which were sampled for 10 seconds. The separation process has been

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ISSN: 2278 909X International Journal of Advanced Research in Electronics and Communication Engineering (IJARECE) Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2013
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evaluated with respect to the time and noise removal has been taken with respect to the sample count. IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION A. Constrained ICA (CICA) The constrained ICA (CICA) (also called ICA with reference) is another option for extracting a number of source signals from a large number of observed signals. For this a proper reference signal has to be created that is closely related to the desired source signal. Reference signals are created in such a way that it is sharply closer to the desired signal making it highly important to CICA. In CICA the shape and pulse of the reference signal highly affect the extracted signals. Sharp reference signals are difficult to be constructed with respect to applications. For example, in the non-invasive extraction of FECG, the desired FECG is very weak so that the accurate occurrence time and shape of each complex of FECG are often not easy to obtain, especially when the fetus is in early phase. Besides, an improperly selected threshold will result in the failure of CICA. A feasible threshold depends on both the designed reference signal and the closeness measure. Given the same data set, different reference signals require different suitable ranges of the threshold value. Similarly, different closeness measures also determine different suitable ranges. It has been suggested to use a small threshold initially, and then gradually increase the threshold. However, this method is not always feasible in practice. Here the reference signals for the mother as well as for the fetus are plotted and the simulated signals are compared with the reference signals. It is seen that the mother and fetal signals resemble exactly the reference signals B. Joint Blind Source Separation (JBSS) In this algorithm, separation of the FECG and MECG signal from the recorded ECG signal so that there is a correct diagnosis obtained during pregnancy. In the JBSS algorithm, the noise has been removed using the Butterworth filter. Then the process of pre-whitening was done for uniform distribution. After that construction of cumulant matrix was done to convert the original matrix into one dimensional matrix which was followed by joint diagonalization. Finally the separation was performed to get the independent mother and fetal signal. C. Comparison of the Separated EHG Signals In Fig 7, 8 and 9 the separated ECG plots for JBSS, CICA and CCA-EMD against the samples are shown. The maternal and fetal signals can be identified by the difference in the frequency rates. As it is seen, in a time span of 1sec, there are two peaks showing a fetal signal which is less in the maternal signal. It is seen that CCA-EMD process shows better separation results as there are components of noise added to the separated signals in both CICA and JBSS.

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Fig 7. ECG after CCA-EMD (in time domain) 635 www.ijarece.org

ISSN: 2278 909X International Journal of Advanced Research in Electronics and Communication Engineering (IJARECE) Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2013
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The above table shows that the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) for CCA-EMD is better in comparison to the JBSS as well as CICA measurements. The value of SIR in CCA-EMD for the maternal signal is 10 times better than the JBSS SIR value. Similarly the SIR values for the fetal signals while CCA-EMD used was 12 times improved than the JBSS case. But when it comes to CICA the SIR values are almost closer to it but greater in magnitude. V. CONCLUSION

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This work includes the separation of the FECG and MECG signal from the recorded ECG signal so that a correct diagnosis can be given during pregnancy regarding the normalcies in the labor or the growth of the child in the womb. CCA-EMD (Canonical Correlation Analysis and Emperical Mode Decomposition) is employed here. The significance of this work is a better approach in finding out the fetal related heart disorders as well as growth process while still in the womb. Analyzing the FECG signals permits the determination of cardiac parameters and, in turn, the identification of cardiac diseases such as acidosis, premature ventricular contractions (PVC), autonomic nervous system activities by spectral heart rate analysis, cardiac arrhythmia, uterine contraction information, etc. Experiments are carried out in stages of pregnancy and during labor. The SIR values have been calculated and found out to be that the SIR values on application of CCA-EMD for mother and fetus are 10 and 12 times more than the values of compared methods. Detecting the fetal heart beat helps in understanding the chances of various heart problems which could be diagnosed at an early gestation period and can be rectified as soon as the baby is born or while still inside the womb. Diseases like hypoxia, Downs syndrome, arrhythmia is found out through the heart waves. These attempts are expected to provide a robust method for the FECG separation and diagnosis problem. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT We would like to sincerely thank Mahmoud Hassan and his team for his support in helping us with the CCA-EMD method suggested. REFERENCES
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TABLE I.

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COMPARISON WITH SIR VALUES SIRf (in dB) 74.44 73.66 62.95 SIRm (in dB) 77.56 73.35 67.54

Methods CCA-EMD CICA JBSS

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B. Karlsson, J. Terrien, V. Gumundsson, T. Steingrmsdottir, and C. Marque, Abdominal EHG on a 4 by 4 grid: Mapping and presenting the propagation of uterine contractions, in Proc.11th Mediterranean Conf.Med. Biol. Eng. Comput. , Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2007, pp. 139143. Daniel Graupe, Yunde Zhong,Menachem Graupe, Extraction of Featl ECG fromMaternal ECG in early Pregnancy, IJBEM, Vol.7, No.1, 2005. Z.Wu and N. Huang, Ensemble empirical mode decomposition: A noiseassisted data analysis method, Adv. Adapt. Data Anal., vol. 1, pp. 141, M. De Vos, A. Vergult, L. De Lathauwer, W. De Clercq, S. Van Huffel, P. Dupont, A. Palmini, andW. Van Paesschen, Canonical decomposition of ictal scalp EEG reliably detects the seizure onset zone, Neuroimage, vol. 37, pp. 844854, Sep. 1, 2007. WangS,James CJ, Extracting rhythmic brain activity for brain computer interfacing through constrained independent component analysis, Comput Intell Neurosci 2007: 41468 M. De Vos, A. Vergult, L. De Lathauwer, W. De Clercq, S. Van Huffel, P. Dupont, A. Palmini, andW. Van Paesschen, Canonical decomposition of ictal scalp EEG reliably detects the seizure onset zone, Neuroimage, vol. 37, pp. 844854, Sep. 1,2007.

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ISSN: 2278 909X International Journal of Advanced Research in Electronics and Communication Engineering (IJARECE) Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2013
H. Leman and C.Marque, Rejection of the maternal electrocardiogram in the electrohysterogram signal, IEEE TransBiomed. Eng., vol. 47, no. 8,pp. 1010 1017, Aug. 2000. [7] W. De Clercq, A. Vergult, B. Vanrumste, W. Van Paesschen, and S. Van Huffel, Canonical correlation analysis applied to remove muscle artifacts from the electroencephalogram, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 53, no. 12, pp. 2583 2587, Dec. 2006M. Hassan, J. Terrien, B. Karlsson, and C.Marque, Interactions between uterine EMG at different sites investigated using wavelet analysis: Comparison of pregnancy and labor contractions, EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process., vol. 2010, p. 9, 2010. [8] B. Mijovic, M. De Vos, I. Gligorijevic, J. Taelman, and S. Van Huffel, Source separation from single-channel recordings by combining empirical-mode decomposition and independent component analysis, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 57, no. 9, pp. 2188 2196, Sep. 2010. [9] M. Blanco-Velasco,B.Weng and K.E.Barner, ECG signal denoising and baseline wander correction based on emperical mode decomposition,Comput.Biol.Med,Vol 38,pp.1-13,2008 [10] Nicolle M. Correa, Yi-Ou-Li, Tulay Adali, Fusion of FMRI,SMRI and EEG Data Using CCA, IEEE ,ICASSP 2009. [11] Mahmoud Hassan, Sofiane Boudaoud, Jeremy Terrien, Brynjar Karlsson, and Catherine Marque,Combination of Canonical Correlation Analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition Applied to Denoising the Labor Electrohysterogram, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 58, no. 9, September 2011 [12] M. Hassan, J. Terrien, B. Karlsson, and C. Marque, Spatial analysis of uterine EMG signals: Evidence of increased in synchronization with term, in Proc. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc. Conf. , 2009, pp. 62966299. [13] J. Terrien, T. Steingrimsdottir, B. Karlsson, and C. Marque, Synchronization between EMG at different uterine locations investigated using time-frequency ridge reconstruction: Comparison of pregnancy and labor contractions, EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process., vol. 2010, p. 10, 2010 [14] Yi-Ou Li, Tulay Adali, Wei Wang, Joint Blind Source Separatyion by Multiset Canonical Correlation Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing , Vol. 57, No. 10, October 2009 [15] Zhi-Lin Zhang, Morphologically constrained ICA for extracting weak temporally correlated signals, 2007 Elsevier B.V. [16] Wei Lu, Member, IEEE, and Jagath C. Rajapakse, Senior Member, IEEE , Approach and Applications of Constrained ICA, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks,Vol.15,No.1,January 2005 [17] Gari D.Clifford, ECG Statistics,Noise,Artifacts and Missing Data, . [18] Raul Llinares, Jorge Igual, Applications of Constrained Independent component analysis algorithms in electro cardiogram analysis, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (2009) 47, 121133 [19] MITBIH Database Distribution, http://www.ecg.mit.edu, [20] Physio Bank Archive Index http://www.phys ionet.org/pn3/nifecgdb [6]

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