Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103275

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Biomedical Signal Processing and Control

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/bspc

A deep learning-based framework For ECG signal denoising based on

stacked cardiac cycle tensor
Arash Rasti-Meymandi , Aboozar Ghaffari *
Biomedical Engineering Department, School of Electrical Engineering, Iran
University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is one of the frequently used non-invasive physiological measurement
Denoising techniques for heart diagnosis. However, ECG signal is often contaminated with various noise and artifacts which
ECG make the diagnosis a challenging task. Recent deep learning models have had promising results in dealing with
Non-local cycles
the noises, however, they only considered the 1D time series of the ECG signal. This paper presents a novel deep
Deep model
Convolutional neural network
learning-based Electrocardiogram (ECG) denoising approach based on the periodicity of the ECG signals. In this
work, ECG cardiac cycles are stacked together to form a 2D signal which will be fed to a convolutional neural
network (CNN) model. Accordingly, the correlation between cardiac cycles can be exploited, resulting in an
efficient and robust ECG denoising. The proposed CNN model is equipped with a novel local/non-local cycle
observation (LNC) module to account for the correlation between the cycles. The proposed framework is applied
to the publicly available MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. Various experiments on different noise conditions have
been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the design. The results have shown the superiority of our
framework over the existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) and
improvement in Signal-To-Noise Ratio (SNRimp ).

1. Introduction
Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most used measurement technique
for heart diagnosis. ECG is produced as the result of depolarization and
repolarization of the heart muscles. Multiple characteristics of the
heart’s functionality can be investigated through an ECG signal such as
QRS complex, P, T, and U waves. Medical experts may further utilize
these characteristics to determine a wide variety of cardiovascular dis­
eases like atrial fibrillation, atrial flutter, arrhythmia, sinus tachycardia,
and sinus bradycardia [1]. Due to the non-invasive acquisition of the
ECG signal in which electrodes are placed on the skin, it is often
contaminated with noises caused by different factors [2]. Therefore, to
have an efficient diagnosis, the ECG signal must be denoised. The three
most dominant noises involved in ECG measurement are: the baseline
wander (BW) usually caused by the patient respiration or movement [3],
muscle artifacts (MA) generated due to the skeletal muscle activity [4],
and electrode motion (EM) arises from electrode impedance and
changes in skin potential [5]. Removing these noises is not a trivial task
since they corrupt a particular part of the ECG spectrum. Furthermore,
powerline interference (PLI) [5] and channel noises such as additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) exist in the ECG signal as well[6]. The
first one only adds 50/60 hertz line frequency, while the latter one af­
fects the entire frequency band of the ECG signal.
ECG denoising has been received much attention throughout the
literature. Perhaps, the first attempts are based on classical linear filters
such as low-pass filter, adaptive filter, and the filter banks [7–9].
Moreover, some authors employed least mean square (LMS) [10],
recursive mean square [11], and Kalman filter [12–15]. One of the
drawbacks of adaptive filtering is the reference noise signal require­
ment, which may not be available. Several others applied non-linear
filtering [16,17]. Signal decomposition techniques in the time domain
have also attracted great attention [18–22]. The most popular ones are
discrete wavelet transform (DWT), empirical mode decomposition
(EMD) [23]. However, DWT has an issue with low-frequency approxi­
mation conefficeint [20]. Moreover, EMD methods have difficulty with
the distinguishment of high-frequency noise and QRS-complex in the
ECG signal. Inspired by the great success in image denoising, non-local
means (NLM) has been shown an effective method for ECG signal
denoising [24,6]. The main problem with the NLM method is the rare-
patch effect [25]. Although, the author in [6] suggested a two-stage

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: aboozar_ghaffari@iust.ac.ir (A. Ghaffari).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bspc.2021.103275
Received 24 July 2021; Received in revised form 30 September 2021; Accepted 15 October 2021
Available online 25 October 2021
1746-8094/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A. Rasti-Meymandi and A. Ghaffari
Fig. 1. Overview of our framework. The ECG signal is transformed to form a 2-dimensional tensor by detaching the cardiac cycles and stacking them together. The
resultant tensor is passed to a CNN model (SCEN-Net) to give a cleaned tensor and then transform back to its original 1-dimensional signal representation.
variational mode decomposition plus NLM (VMD-NLM) framework to
lessen the issues with the classical NLM method. A general problem with
these techniques is their incapability of denoising in a situation where
different sorts of noises and interference exist.
With the advent of deep learning in the field of image denoising and
their remarkable success, several works have also utilized deep models
for ECG denoising with inspiring outcomes [26–28]. Some earlier works
such as [29] employed an artificial neural network (ANN) in conjunction
with DWT thresholding for ECG denoising. They reported a significant
improvement over conventional DWT techniques. Authors in [26] used
an improved denoising auto-encoder (DAE) with wavelet transform
(WT). They first apply a threshold to the noisy ECG signal using WT and
then feed the residual signal to the DAE model. In their report, the SNR
improvement was better than the individual WT or DAE method.
Another recent work in the field of ECG denoising was introduced in
[30]. Their framework was based on the generative adversarial network,
and they have achieved better results compared to the work in [26]. We
encourage readers to study more about ECG denoising techniques and
their comparisons in [31].
Although most of the deep learning-based denoising techniques re­
ported superior results in contrast to DWT, EMD, NLM, etc., they only
considered the ECG signal’s time-series relationship. Furthermore, the
results of their work also indicate that there are still rooms for further
improvement, especially in noise conditions such as EM and MA.
There are also some works in the literature regarding the exploitation
of cardiac cycles’ correlation by transforming the 1D signal into 2D
tensors. Considering the stacked cycles of an ECG signal dates back to
many years ago. Authors in [32], introduced an improved wavelet-based
2D ECG data compression method by considering both interbeat and
inter-sample redundancies in the ECG signal. In recent works such as
[33], authors transformed 1D ECG signal into 2D ECG image for the
application of user recognition. Another work in [34], transformed a 1D
ECG signal into a 2D spectrogram by applying a continuous wavelet
transform for arrhythmia detection although, it differs from stacking
cardiac cycles for the sake of their correlation.
In this work, we have developed an end-to-end stacked cardiac cycle
ECG denoising based on a 2-dimensional deep convolutional neural
network (CNN), namely as “SCED-Net”. The key contributions of our
work are summarized as follows.
• We have considered the pseudo-periodicity of the ECG signal by
detaching each cardiac cycle and creating a stacked cardiac cycle
(SCC) tensor to form a 2-dimensional signal. The CNN model is fed
2
Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103275
with these SCC tensors and returns the denoised version of each cycle
in the tensor. Afterward, the cycles in the tensor attach to form the
denoised 1-dimensional ECG signal.
• The proposed network is modified with local/non-local cycle
observation modules (LNC modules) to account for the non-local
cycles of ECG signal.
• The proposed method shows a significant improvement over the
CNN model that only considers the 1-dimensional time series of ECG
signals. We show that our proposed LNC module substantially im­
proves the proposed method, especially in the presence of non-
stationary noises.
• We show that our proposed model is capable of denoising an ECG
signal in various SNR levels, and it is generalized to different noise
sources.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the
ECG denoising procedure and the novel LNC module are explained in
detail. The experimental results are reported in Section 3. An investi­
gation on the performance of the framework and some remarks are
presented in Section 4, and finally, the conclusion is gathered in Section
5.
2. Proposed method
In this section, we elaborate on the proposed approach for ECG signal
denoising. Given a noisy ECG signal, the goal is to denoise the signal by
considering both the time-domain and periodicity of an ECG signal
behavioral. The block diagram of our framework is illustrated in Fig. 1.
As the pre-processing step, we first locate the R-peaks of ECG signals.
Next, we create a 2-dimensional representation of an ECG signal by
detaching the cardiac cycles involved in the signal. The reason behind
such representation is to take the pseudo-periodicity of the signal into
account. Due to the variability of ECG cardiac cycles, a time-domain
interpolation is applied to equalize the number of samples of each
cycle. We then are able to create SCC tensors by concatenating the 1-
dimensional cycles to form a 2-dimensional tensor. An encoder-
decoder architecture (SCEN-Net) is used to act as a block of image-
denoising on SCC tensors. The network is enhanced specifically for
SCC tensor denoising by considering local and non-local cycles in SCC
tensors. Finally, a post-processing operation converts each SCC back to
the 1-dimensional ECG signal. The following is the detailed instruction
of our framework implementation.
A. Rasti-Meymandi and A. Ghaffari
Fig. 2. An illustration of the LNC block and how it performs. (a) block description (b) the kernel size and their dilation representation in Convolution layers.
2.1. Pre-processing on ECG signal
2.1.1. R-peaks detection and Signal detaching
The nature of an ECG signal is considered to be periodic. However,
the periodicity may be corrupted due to various factors, making the ECG
a pseudo-periodic signal. Therefore, to consider this behavior, a time-
varying lag τi is defined. A noisy ECG can be modeled by
xn (t) = x(t) + n(t),
where xn (t), x(t) and n(t) are the noisy ECG signal, the clean ECG, and
the additive noise, respectively. In order to calculate τi , R-peak locations
must be acquired. We employed the real-time implementation of the Pan
& Tompkins algorithm [35] to gather R-peaks and denote them as R =
{Ri }m
1 where m is the total number of R-peaks. We can now define the
variable τi as follows
τi = ⌊
Ri + Ri+1
2 ⌋
, i = 1, 2, m − 1
where ⌊.⋅⌋ is the floor operator. Note that due to the non-stationary
characteristic of the ECG signal, τi may be variable. Knowing the time-
periodic of the ECG signal, we may segment an ECG cardiac cycle as
xicyc ∈ [x(t − τi ), x(t − τi+1 )].
From now on, we consider xicyc as the discrete samples of the continuous
ECG signal. Therefore, an ECG tensor is created by stacking all xicyc in
rows as follows
[ ]T
Xstacked = x1cyc , x2cyc …, xmcyc .
2.1.2. Signal interpolation and SCC tensor generation
The ECG tensor must be a rectangular matrix to use as an input to a
CNN model. However, xicyc in Xstacked contradicts this constraint. To
tackle this problem, we up-sample each xicyc to have equal total samples
denoted by Ncyc . We use the interpolation based on the Fourier transform
of each cycle xicyc to produce Ncyc equally spaced points in time-domain
where Ncyc is the fixed number of samples that each cycle xicyc must
possess in order to create ECG tensors. More specifically, we zero pad the
cycle xicyc in Fourier domain by the number (Ncyc − Ni ) where Ni is the
sample number of xicyc and then use inverse Fourier transform to get the
interpolated signal in the time-domain. Note that the extra samples
resulted from the interpolation are only used to equalize the sample
numbers of xicyc . We further store the number of zeros inserted in xicyc in
their Fourier domain to remove them in the post-processing stage. The
reason behind up-sampling (and not down-sampling) is that this trick
will lose no information of the actual ECG signal.
Remark 1. Another technique in equalizing the cycles for constructing
TSCC tensors is by zero-padding each xicyc in the time-domain. There is, in
Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103275
fact, a dual relationship between zero-padding the cycles in the time-
domain and Fourier-domain. As a result, both zero-padding and inter­
polation in the time-domain act similarly due to this duality. However,
when the signal is interpolated in the time-domain, the stacked cycles
exhibit more correlation than when they are zero-padded. Moreover, the
kernels of the CNN model might have difficulty extracting features from
non-even zero-padded cycles in TSCC .
(1) Due to the variability of the number of samples in xicyc , Ncyc must be
selected carefully so that xicyc always needs to be up-sampled. Therefore,
we should consider the maximum number of samples in xicyc before up-
sampling. Let fs and HRmin be the sampling frequency and the minimum
heart rate per minute, respectively; the maximum number of samples for
a single cardiac cycle is calculated as follows.
60
N max
cyc = fs , (5)
HRmin
(2)
This expression implies that each segment xicyc has at most Nmax
cyc samples.
Hence, the choice of Ncyc is constrained by Ncyc ⩾Nmax
cyc . This constraint
will insure that all xicyc are interpolated properly. Finally, the SCC tensors
are created by stacking the interpolated cycles denoted by xicyc,ip as
(3) [ ]T
TSCC = x1cyc,ip , x2cyc,ip …, xmcyc,ip . (6)
2.2. SCED-Net Architecture
2.2.1. Local/non-local cycle observation module
(4)
As mentioned earlier, the ECG signal has a periodic characteristic in
which each cycle resembles one another. Therefore, a particular cardiac
cycle not only correlates with its neighboring cycles but also with those
of non-local ones. Traditional convolutional operations, on the other
hand, process local neighborhoods. Therefore, long-range dependencies
in SCC tensors cannot be captured normally unless repeated convolution
layers with large kernel sizes are used. However, this makes the network
computationally inefficient and causes optimization difficulty [36].
Here, we propose a novel module to involve both local and non-local
dependencies of the cardiac cycles in TSCC , e.g., “LNC module”. The
details of LNC can be observed in Fig. 2. It comprises three 2D Convo­
lution layers lined up in parallel with different dilation rates. Convolu­
tion with dilation rate has been used extensively to overcome the
limitation of the receptive field in CNNs [37,38]. Here, these convolu­
tion layers consider extracting features from local to non-local cycles in
TSCC as shown in Fig. .2a. Each one is followed by batch normalization
(BN) and leaky-relu with α = 0.01. The consequent extracted feature
channels are then concatenated and passed to a BN and a 1 × 1 convo­
lution layer. We have also passed the input of the module to a 1 × 1
convolution and added it to the extracted feature maps to act as a re­
sidual connection similar to the original work in [36]. The kernel size of
each convolution layer is set to (3, 7). The dilation rates are set to (1, 1)
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A. Rasti-Meymandi and A. Ghaffari Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103275

is set for the loss function of the training optimization as follows.

1 ∑N
loss = |T c − T gSCC,n |, (8)
N n=1 SCC,n

g
where T SCC,n and TcSCC,n denote the normalized ground-truth and cleaned
SCC tensors, respectively. Furthermore, since the gradient of the MAE
loss function does not slow down when it is near the convergence point,
a step-decay learning rate is used with an initial learning rate of 10− 3
and a step decay of 0.5 after every 50 epochs.

2.3. Post-processing on SCC tensor

After the SCED-Net outputs the cleaned version T cSCC,n , true ampli­
tudes of the tensor are restored as follows.
Fig. 3. The CNN model architecture for SCC tensor denoising. ( ( ) ( )) ( )
T cSCC = T cSCC,n max T nSCC − min T nSCC + min T nSCC (9)

, (2, 1) and (4, 1) (see Fig. 2b). We do not dilate the kernels in the time- i
domain direction of the input. This is due to the fact that the de­ Next, each cleaned cardiac cycle in T cSCC , denoted by ̂
x cyc,ip , must be
pendencies or correlations mostly exist in stacked cycles direction. It is returned to its original sampling rate. We eliminate the zeros added to
noteworthy to say that the number of parallel convolution layers can be each cycle in their Fourier domain and then, use the inverse Fourier to
extended to more convolution layers with larger dilation rates in order obtain the cleaned cycles with its original sampling rate. This gives us
i
to involve more distant non-local cardiac cycles. Here, we only used x cyc . Finally, the cleaned cardiac cycles can be attached to form the
̂
three layers for the sake of simplicity in representation and imple­ original 1-dimensional representation of the cleaned ECG signal, i.e.,
mentation. The experimental results show how our LNC module with xc (t).
only three convolution layers could considerably improve performance
in the ECG denoising task. 3. Experiments

2.2.2. The CNN model 3.1. Performance metrics

SCED-Net has an encoder-decoder architecture, as shown in Fig. 3.
The input size of the network is set to 32 × 384. Note that in this work we To have an objective evaluation of the proposed framework, three
consider HRmin = 60 bpm. Therefore, according to (5), the sample performance metrics of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Signal-to-Noise
number of each xicyc,ip is constraint by Ncyc ⩾360 which is realized in the Ratio Improvement (SNRimp ), and Root-Mean-Squared Error(RMSE)
selected input size. Furthermore, the input of the proposed model is are used similar to the previous works in [26,30,6]. The mathematical
normalized using min–max normalization as follows. formulation of these metrics is as follows.
( )
T nSCC − min T nSCC ∑
N
T nSCC,n = ( n ) ( n ), (7) (xg (t))2
max T SCC − min T SCC
SNR = 10log10 t=1
, (10)
∑
N
(xc (t) − xg (t))2
where min(⋅) and max(⋅) denote the minimum and maximum values for t=1
the tensor and T nSCC,n is the normalized version of noisy SCC tensor TnSCC .
These two values will be further stored in order to recover the true ∑
N
(xn (t) − xg (t))2
amplitudes of the tensor after it is cleaned by SCED-Net.
SNRimp = 10log10 t=1 , (11)
There exist four encoder and decoder blocks in the network. The ∑N
(xc (t) − xg (t))2
encoder blocks contain the LNC modules that extract features from t=1
local/non-local cardiac cycles. Since stacked cycles, e.g., xicyc,ip , may not √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅
√
be sufficiently correlated, we use the Max Pooling layer with size (1,2) √1 ∑ N

before going to the next LNC module. This will only down-sample the RMSE = 100√ (xc (t) − xg (t))2 , (12)
N t=1
time direction of each cycle in TSCC . An exception of down-sampling
occurs from the LNC4 to the latent space (see Fig. 3). This is because
where xn (t), xg (t) and xc (t) are the noisy signal, the ground-truth signal
the more we go deep into the network, the more similar each xicyc,ip
and the cleaned ECG signal, respectively.
becomes with each other. The decoder blocks are similar to a residual
block with a 1 × 1 convolution layer in the residual skip connection (see
3.2. Database
Fig. 3). The experiment results show that using the LNC module only in
the encoder path can achieve better performance. This is because the
We use the publicly available MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database for the
decoder path performs the reconstruction of the signal from the
training and testing data[39]. It contains 48 half-hour ECG recordings
extracted features of the encoder path. The Mean-Absolute-Error (MAE)
from different patients, which can provide us with a large dataset for the
proposed framework performance analysis. The sampling rate of all
Table 1 recordings is set to 360 Hz. All recordings consist of two leads. We select
The architecture descriptions used in the evaluation.
lead II as it is the most commonly used lead in ECG recording.
Model Filter-size at each level No. parameters

1D En-Dec {32,64,128,256,384,256,128,64,32} 5,456,481 3.3. Evaluations and results

SCED-Net {16,32,64,128,256,128,64,32,16} 5,039,889
SCED-Net + LNC {16,32,64,128,256,128,64,32,16} 5,389,825
Here we implement three network architectures to assess the impact

4
A. Rasti-Meymandi and A. Ghaffari Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103275

Table 2
The effect of different dilation and kernel size on the performance of the pro­
posed framework in the presence of realistic mixed noises.
Setting SNRimp RMSE

No. dilation blocks kernel size

Non (3,7) 15.31 0.051

2 (3,7) 17.44 0.039
3 (3,7) 18.23 0.034
4 (3,7) 18.31 0.034
3 (5,5) 18.15 0.035
3 (5,12) 18.18 0.035

of using SCC tensors and the proposed LNC module on ECG denoising
Fig. 5. Record by record evaluation of different techniques on ECG denoising.
along with other techniques in the literature. The three networks are i) The records are from the MIT-BTH database and are chosen similar to [24,6].
SCED-Net with LNC module in the encoding path (see Fig. 3), ii) SCED-
Net, which is constructed as the original U-Net in [40], and iii) 1D En-
Dec, which is similar to SCED-Net architecture with the difference of
using 1D convolutions and window size of 1 × 1024 as an input. The
architecture descriptions are presented in Table 1. Note that the number
of parameters for each model is close to each other in order to avoid its
effect on the comparison results. To have a complete evaluation of the
proposed framework, we have conducted three separate experiments.
The training and test data are prepared using all the records in the MIT-
BTH Arrhythmia database. It should be noted that in all experiments the
R-peaks are located after the noise insertion.

3.4. Hyperparameter selection and loss function

3.4.1. Loss function selection

The most widely used loss function is either Mean-Squared-Error
(MSE) or the Mean-Absolute-Error (MAE). There are some in­
vestigations on MAE versus MSE performance and their robustness
against different noises, which concluded that MAE yields better per­
formance [41]. In this regard, we trained the proposed model on real­
istic mixed noises to concur the analysis in [41]. The SNRimp for the MAE
and the MSE loss function are achieved as 19.34 and 17.22, respectively.
As a result, we use the MAE as the loss function for training the proposed
framework.

3.4.2. Dilation blocks and kernels in the LNC module

We have conducted some experiments evaluating the effect of
different the number of parallel blocks with dilation in the LNC module
and the kernel size. Table 2 shows the performance of different networks
equipped with different settings. Note that “No. dilation blocks” in the
table indicate the number of parallel blocks in the LNC module with
different dilation rates. As seen, a larger number of dilation blocks could
result in slightly better performance, however, at the cost of network
complexity. It is also observed that the proposed SCED-Net with di­ Fig. 6. Qualitative results of different techniques on ECG denoising. The
lations (SCED-Net + LNC) significantly outperforms SCED-Net without segment is selected from record 230 with SNRin = 0dB.
the LNC module, which is indicated as ”non“ in Table 2. Since the
improvement is modest among networks with different dilation rates
and kernels, we chose the one with 3 dilations and the kernel size (3, 7)

Fig. 4. Quantitative performance evaluation of various techniques in ECG denoising when the signal is contaminated with AWGN.

5
A. Rasti-Meymandi and A. Ghaffari
Fig. 7. Comparison results of various deep learning-based approaches. The noisy signals are synthesized using the combination of BW, MA, and EM noise conditions
gathered from [45].
Fig. 8. Objective assessment of the proposed framework as opposed to the conventional 1D En-Dec for ECG denoising. A chunk of data with SNRin = − 1dB from (a)
the record number 122, and (b) the record number 111.
to have a low complexity while obtaining a decent performance.
3.4.3. AWGN noise
In this experiment, the ECG signal is assumed to be contaminated
with AWGN. Our proposed framework is compared with the existing
ECG denoising algorithms based on NLM-filtering [24], VMD-filtering
[42], and WWF-filtering [43]. 75% of the original dataset is used as
the training while the other 25% is selected as the test data. The original
dataset is used as the clean for the deep-learning models. We prepared
the noisy training data by adding AWGN to the clean dataset with
SNR = { − 1, 3, 7, 11, 15}dB. The noisy test data is contaminated with
AWGN at SNR = {0, 5, 10, 15}dB as suggested in [24,6]. The reason for
using different SNR in train and test data is to have a more objective
evaluation. The experimental results on the two performance metrics
(RMSE and SNRimp ) of various methods performed on the test data are
shown in Fig. 4. As seen, both the SCED-Net architectures give distin­
guishable results from the 1D En-Dec network and other classical algo­
rithms, particularly at low SNRin . Fig. 5 shows the evaluation of the
proposed framework on some individual recordings that were used by
the existing methods [24,6,44]. As it is observed, both SCED-Nets obtain
the highest SNRimp in all seven recordings. To have a qualitative
assessment on different methods performance, a chunk of denoised
samples obtained from the proposed and the existing techniques are
illustrated in Fig. 6. Here, the noisy signal from ECG record 230 is
contaminated with AWGN at SNR = 0dB. Looking closely, one can
observe how well the P, QRS, and T waves are preserved using the
proposed framework (the bottom signal). Note that the performance of
SCED-Net with and without the LNC module is quite comparable. This
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Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103275
Remark will be further elaborated on in the discussion section.
3.4.4. Mixed realistic noises
To analyze the proposed framework performance in the presence of
real noises, we collect the BW, MA, and EM noises from the MIT-BIH
Noise Stress Test Database (NSTDB)[45]. As suggested in [27], the
noisy signals are created by adding the three noises to the clean dataset
with equal weights. the procedure for creating training and test data is
the same as [27]. 80% of the dataset is then used for the training with
SNR = { − 2.5,0,2.5,5,7.5}dB. The other 20% is chosen for the test data
with SNR = { − 1, 3, 7}dB. The experimental results of the three net­
works along with the FCN architecture introduced in [27] is depicted in
Fig. 7. As it can be observed, Using SCC tensors obtains better results
(SCED-Net) compared with one-dimensional ECG signals used in 1D En-
Dec and FCN architectures. We can also see a significant improvement
when the LNC module is embedded within the SCED-Net. An objective
evaluation on a chuck of samples from ECG record 122 and 111 at
SNRin = − 1dB is illustrated in Fig. 8. As Seen in Fig. 8b, SCED-Net has
better preserved the amplitudes of the R-peaks compared to 1D En-Dec.
3.4.5. BW, MA, and EM noises induced separately
In this experiment, we evaluate the proposed framework on the BW,
MA, and EM noises separately as suggested in [30,26]. The data prep­
aration is the same as the work in [26]. The training data is contami­
nated with BW, MA, EM noises at SNR = { − 1.25, 0, 5}dB. The same
SNRs is considered for the test data. Furthermore, the dataset is split
with 75% training data and 25% test data. Here, the test data consists of
only ten records from the MIT-BIH database to have a fair comparison
A. Rasti-Meymandi and A. Ghaffari Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103275

Table 3
Performance comparison of SCED-Net + LNC against the denoising auto-encoder and ECG-GAN on ECG signals corrupted with MA, EM, and BW noises.
Record 103 105 111 116 122 205 213 219 223 230 Average

SNRin BW noise
denoising auto-encoder [26] 0 SNR 23.78 25.40 23.31 23.51 20.07 20.07 21.30 23.02 24.25 22.72 22.74
RMSE 0.026 0.028 0.034 0.027 0.050 0.050 0.032 0.024 0.027 0.037 0.034
1.25 SNR 23.82 25.42 23.32 23.59 20.08 20.08 21.36 23.31 24.41 22.74 22.81
RMSE 0.026 0.028 0.034 0.027 0.050 0.050 0.032 0.023 0.027 0.037 0.033
5 SNR 23.89 25.45 23.35 23.76 20.08 20.08 21.46 24.08 24.64 22.79 22.96
RMSE 0.025 0.027 0.034 0.026 0.050 0.050 0.031 0.021 0.026 0.037 0.033
ECG-GAN [30] 5 SNR 30.70 27.01 28.03 32.49 28.06 25.85 31.66 32.42 31.59 29.17 29.69
RMSE 0.019 0.022 0.014 0.022 0.039 0.021 0.025 0.020 0.021 0.022 0.022
Proposed framework 0 SNR 29.42 28.13 26.82 28.61 28.43 27.54 27.49 27.68 28.02 25.71 27.87
RMSE 0.018 0.021 0.025 0.023 0.037 0.021 0.022 0.021 0.022 0.028 0.023
1.25 SNR 30.16 28.92 27.77 29.45 29.34 28.43 28.62 28.50 28.78 26.63 28.66
RMSE 0.018 0.021 0.023 0.022 0.035 0.019 0.023 0.021 0.022 0.026 0.023
5 SNR 31.34 30.04 29.08 30.89 31.11 29.85 30.17 29.26 29.89 28.06 29.96
RMSE 0.017 0.020 0.014 0.023 0.035 0.017 0.036 0.020 0.021 0.023 0.022
SNRin MA noise
denoising auto-encoder 0 SNR 21.38 24.72 23.15 19.22 19.57 24.23 19.59 18.80 22.91 22.58 21.62
RMSE 0.034 0.030 0.035 0.045 0.040 0.031 0.038 0.039 0.032 0.038 0.036
1.25 SNR 22.41 24.86 23.27 20.22 20.02 24.49 19.78 19.63 23.41 22.60 22.07
RMSE 0.031 0.029 0.034 0.040 0.038 0.030 0.037 0.034 0.030 0.038 0.034
5 SNR 23.33 25.13 23.33 22.41 20.63 24.67 20.63 21.97 24.21 22.63 22.89
RMSE 0.027 0.028 0.034 0.031 0.036 0.030 0.034 0.027 0.028 0.038 0.031
ECG-GAN 5 SNR 25.34 29.01 25.22 30.90 30.51 26.77 27.16 28.27 30.41 29.68 28.32
RMSE 0.018 0.021 0.015 0.019 0.026 0.021 0.026 0.021 0.016 0.015 0.019
Proposed framework 0 SNR 25.77 25.33 21.20 26.04 24.79 24.99 25.43 26.74 25.98 24.02 25.23
RMSE 0.023 0.027 0.022 0.023 0.031 0.024 0.028 0.023 0.025 0.023 0.024
1.25 SNR 26.67 26.33 22.05 27.15 25.67 25.90 26.96 27.22 26.56 25.05 25.95
RMSE 0.023 0.025 0.020 0.022 0.030 0.022 0.027 0.022 0.023 0.022 0.023
5 SNR 27.65 27.51 23.5 28.37 27.06 27.35 28.34 28.74 27.71 26.26 27.24
RMSE 0.017 0.023 0.018 0.021 0.028 0.019 0.025 0.020 0.019 0.020 0.021
SNRin EM noise
denoising auto-encoder 0 SNR 22.75 23.70 23.39 21.34 17.70 23.47 19.33 18.38 23.17 22.40 21.56
RMSE 0.029 0.033 0.034 0.035 0.050 0.033 0.040 0.041 0.031 0.039 0.037
1.25 SNR 22.97 23.94 23.57 21.82 18.76 23.57 19.79 19.07 23.55 22.54 21.96
RMSE 0.029 0.033 0.033 0.033 0.042 0.033 0.037 0.038 0.030 0.038 0.035
5 SNR 23.45 24.66 23.65 23.08 20.81 23.66 20.69 21.01 24.00 22.81 22.78
RMSE 0.027 0.030 0.033 0.030 0.035 0.030 0.034 0.030 0.028 0.037 0.031
ECG-GAN 5 SNR 25.40 26.20 25.38 24.68 30.90 24.80 30.58 26.53 31.05 24.27 26.97
RMSE 0.022 0.024 0.014 0.021 0.028 0.026 0.028 0.025 0.021 0.018 0.022
Proposed framework 0 SNR 27.29 24.85 23.86 26.87 26.31 27.12 25.48 27.05 27.89 23.65 26.04
RMSE 0.019 0.025 0.021 0.020 0.033 0.028 0.036 0.025 0.024 0.019 0.025
1.25 SNR 28.40 26.06 25.16 28.14 27.39 28.22 26.99 27.65 28.74 24.81 27.15
RMSE 0.020 0.025 0.018 0.019 0.032 0.025 0.033 0.025 0.023 0.017 0.022
5 SNR 29.68 27.48 26.73 29.67 28.82 29.34 29.03 28.12 29.45 26.16 28.44
RMSE 0.018 0.024 0.015 0.017 0.029 0.023 0.028 0.024 0.022 0.015 0.021

three separate noise conditions compared to the denoising auto-encoder.

Furthermore, we can observe that although the proposed framework
gives a comparable result with the ECG-GAN for MA noise conditions,
the performance metrics for BW and EM noise conditions are better than
that of the ECG-GAN.

4. Discussion and remarks

Fig. 9. The learning curve of different network architectures in the presence of
the realistic mixed noises.
with the previous existing works in [30,26]. Table 3 shows the results of
the proposed framework compared with the state-of-the-art ECG-GAN
[30] and the denoising auto-encoder [26] methods. Note that for the
ECG-GAN, the authors reported the RMSE and SNRout metrics only at
SNRin = 5dB. We can deduce from this table that the proposed frame­
work gives a substantially better performance at all the SNRin for the
This paper presents a novel scheme for a robust ECG denoising under
various noise conditions at different SNRin levels. The network receives
an SCC tensor as an input constructed by stacking the cardiac cycles
together to form a 2D signal. The idea is to consider the periodicity of
ECG signals. The proposed network can consider the local cycles and the
non-local cycles using the proposed novel LNC module. The effect of
both using the SCC tensor and the LNC module in the convergence of the
learning process can be observed in Fig. 9. As seen, It is apparent that the
SCED-Net with LNC performs consistently better in terms of SNRimp
throughout the learning process.
Through a careful inspection in Fig. 4 and Fig. 7, one might ask that
why the SCED-Net embedded with LNC modules compared to simple
SCED-Net, considerably improves the SNR with the realistic noises
whereas, no improvement is seen for AWGN noise condition? The
answer perhaps lies within the characteristics of the noises. AWGN is a

7
A. Rasti-Meymandi and A. Ghaffari
Fig. 10. An exploring examination on the amount of cycle dependency of SECD-Net with and without the LNC module. (a) realistic mixed noise, (b) AWGN noise.
Fig. 11. An example of a corrupted tensor with faulty detected R-peaks. (a) Its
corresponding clean and denoised tensor. (b) The unrolled version of the ten­
sors form sample 3000 to 9000.
stationary noise where the SNR is roughly consistent in each cardiac
cycle. Therefore it does not matter that the correlation of local cycles or
non-local cycles is considered by the network. On the other hand, BW,
MA, and particularly EM noises are quite non-stationary in which one
cycle might be damaged by the noise, whereas the surrounding cycles
might be less affected. In other words, the non-local cycles might have
even more information than the local ones. As a result, The SCED-Net
with LNC module would prefer to pay more attention to the local/
non-local cycles’ correlation. In order to test this assumption, we car­
ried out the following experiment. We created new data from the test
dataset in five categories in which the cardiac cycles are being repeated
to form SCCs. For category one, no repetition is applied; for category
two, half of the cycles are repeated (meaning only 16 out of 32
consecutive cycles are unique); for category three, a quarter of the total
cycles are unique, and so on. The reason for the manual repetition is to
evaluate the dependency of the network on the local/non-local cycles.
Therefore, if the dependency is high, SNRimp should decrease fast as the
number of repetitions in each category increases. Fig. 10 shows the
8
Biomedical Signal Processing and Control 71 (2022) 103275
results of this experiment. We can see that the reduction in SNRimp is
much faster than that of the AWGN noise case for the real noise case.
Also, as seen in Fig. 10a, the slope of the reduction curve for SCED-Net
with embedded LNC module is higher than the simple SCED-Net at the
first four categories. The results of this experiment could support our
aforementioned assumption. Therefore, we can speculate that the pro­
posed framework is more capable when it comes to ECG signals with
non-stationary noise characteristics.
Remark 2. One of the problems that arise from using the proposed
scheme is the initiation time of the denoising. The framework requires
32 cardiac cycles to start the denoising. The waiting might be undesir­
able. Hence, to alleviate such a situation, we can repeat the first actual
cardiac cycle 32 times, and when two actual cycles are received, we then
repeat the actual ones until they reach 32 cycles (the framework’s input
is 32 × 384). Therefore, as deduced in Fig. 10, the SNRimp will reach its
maximum performance while improving over the initial time interval. It
is worth mentioning that after the first 32 actual cycles are received, a
moving window of size 32 could be considered to take the newest 32
cycles into account. Accordingly, the framework will operate in real-
time.
Remark 3. Since cycles are collected using R-peaks locations, the role
of the QRS-detector might influence the performance of the network. As
an example, consider a tensor collected from record 214 illustrated in
Fig. 11a. This special record contains multiple ectopic beats in which,
the QRS-detector fallaciously considers them as R-peaks. We can see that
despite the irregularities in the noisy tensor due to wrongly detected R-
peaks, the output tensor of the SCED-Net is sufficiently accurate.
Fig. 11b shows the unrolled versions of the tensors. It is apparent from
this figure that the performance is insignificantly decreased from sample
6000 to 9000. This reduction of performance is predictable since these
abnormalities have less correlation with most of the ECG signal.
Therefore, the performance of the proposed framework might slightly
decrease in case of pathological beats or wrongly detected R-peaks;
however, it still manages to yield a good result.
5. Conclusion
A novel framework specialized for ECG signal denoising was pre­
sented in this paper. The proposed framework was based on a con­
volutional neural network. It was capable of considering both local and
non-local cardiac cycles in order to perform an efficient ECG denoising.
This is a beneficial property since the ECG signal exhibits pseudo-
periodicity and cardiac cycles tend to have a high correlation. Multi­
ple experiments were conducted on noises such as AWGN, BW, MA, and
EM. The proposed framework showed a substantially better perfor­
mance compared to the networks with 1D time-series input signal and
other existing state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, further assess­
ment of the proposed framework suggested that it is particularly well-
suited for removing non-stationary noises such as MA and EM.
Currently, our model is designed to select non-local cycles at some
A. Rasti-Meymandi and A. Ghaffari
predetermined intervals with the use of dilated convolution layers.
Further investigation on how to dynamically select the non-local cycles
would be advantageous which is left for future work.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Arash Rasti-Meymandi: Methodology, Software, Validation,
Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Aboozar Ghaffari:
Conceptualization, Validation, Investigation, Writing - review & editing,
Supervision.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
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