Artefact rejection from Wigner Ville spectra of cardiovascular series in autonomic tests

Wigner Ville distribution has many of the desirable features for the spectral analysis of cardiovascular series during the transients of the autonomic tests, but the presence of the artefacts makes power measurements from the spectra often unreliable. This work proposes new approaches for rejecting artefacts, besides the well known spectral averaging. In particular, an appropriate preprocessing and a segment-regression based smoothing are considered and compared with the classical approach, taking into account both the different characteristics of the considered autonomic tests