A New ECG enhancement algorithm for stress ECG tests

In real situations, ECG recordings are often corrupted by artifacts. Two dominant artifacts present in ECG are: 1) High frequency noise caused by electromyogram induced noise, power line interferences, or mechanical forces acting on the electrodes; 2) Baseline wander that may be due to respiration or the motion of the patients or the instruments. These artifacts severely limit the utility of the recorded ECG and thus need to be removed for better clinical evaluation. Several methods have been developed for ECG enhancement. In this paper, we proposed a new ECG enhancement method based on the recently developed empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The proposed EMD- based method is able to remove both high frequency noise and baseline wander with minimum signal distortion. The method is validated through experiments on the MIT-BIH databases.