Automatic ECG Artefact Removal from EEG Signals

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are frequently contaminated by ocular, muscle, and cardiac artefacts whose removal normally requires manual inspection or the use of reference channels (EOG, EMG, ECG). We present a novel, fully automatic method for the detection and removal of ECG artefacts that works without a reference ECG channel. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is applied to the measured data and the independent components are examined for the presence of QRS waveforms using an adaptive threshold-based QRS detection algorithm. Detected peaks are subsequently classified by a rule-based classifier as ECG or non-ECG components. Components manifesting ECG activity are marked for removal, and then the artefact-free signal is reconstructed by removing these components before performing the inverse ICA. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on a number of EEG datasets and compared to results reported in the literature. The average sensitivity of our ECG artefact removal method is above 99 %, which is better than known literature results.