Simultaneously Concentrated PSWF-based Synchrosqueezing S-transform and its application to R peak detection in ECG signal

Abstract

Time-frequency (TF) analysis through well-known TF tool namely S-transform (ST) has been extensively used for QRS detection in Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. However, Gaussian window-based conventional ST suffers from poor TF resolution due to the fixed scaling criterion and the long taper of the Gaussian window. Many variants of ST using different scaling criteria have been reported in literature for improving the accuracy in the detection of QRS complexes. This paper presents the usefulness of zero-order prolate spheroidal wave function (PSWF) as a window kernel in ST. PSWF has ability to concentrate maximum energy in narrow and finite time and frequency intervals, and provides more flexibility in changing window characteristics. Synchrosqueezing transform is a post processing method that improves the energy concentration in a TFR remarkably. This paper proposes a PSWF-based synchrosqueezing ST for detection of R peaks in ECG signals. The results show that the proposed method accurately detects R peaks with a sensitivity, positive predictivity and accuracy of 99.96 %, 99. 96% and 99. 92% respectively. It also improves upon on existing techniques in terms of the aforementioned metrics and the search back range.