International Conference on BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING & ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES NIT Jalandhar, Punjab, India (December 17-19, 2010)

A Review on Biomedical Systems and Biomedical Signal Processing Techniques

Sachin Sharma, Irshad Ahmad Ansari Department of Instrumentation and Control Engineering, NIT Jalandhar, India
Email: glasachin@yahoo.co.in, 01.irshad@gmail.com

Abstract With the help of biomedical signal processing techniques Combining with state of the art technology, we can produce sophisticated systems that can improve the treatment facilities available to a patient and can extend the capabilities of the disabled person, such as life support systems, health monitoring systems, ECG, MRI and electroencephalogram. In this paper, a thorough review, of biomedical systems and biomedical signal processing methods and techniques, is done. AT the end of the paper, future trends in biomedical systems and processing techniques are discussed. Keywords- Signal processing, state vector machine, hidden markov model, rehabilitation systems, wavelet transform

Biomedical systems are defined into two broad categories: medical systems and rehabilitate systems. Medical systems are those systems which are used to diagnose patient problems and to monitor its condition. Rehabilitate systems are those systems which aims to enable a disabled person to reach an optimum mental, physical, and/or social function[2]. Hence medical systems with advancing in biomedical signal processing techniques help patient in critical conditions, helps doctors to recognize the problem before it become worst and helps in providing better treatment. While rehabilitate systems (including robotics) improve the quality of life and productivity of work of a physically disabled man. Examples are in daily living activities like playing games, eating, walking etc. and vocational tasks, such as, paper handling in office work or test procedures in laboratory-based work etc. Thoroughly details about these rehabilitate systems is given in [3-4]. Hence, we see that using biomedical signal processing in combination with biomedical systems improves the treatment quality of a patient and improves the living standard of a disabled person by providing great ease in their work,.

1. Introduction
Till few years ago, processing of biomedical signal was mainly concentrating on studying and improving the biosignals like removing noise and power lines interference; spectral analysis and modeling of these signals for feature representation and parameterization. But nowadays, biomedical signal processing is not confining itself to signal study but expanding to a wide range of application, from the construction of artificial limbs and aids for disabilities to the development of sophisticated medical imaging systems such as ultrasound scanners[1]. Today scenario is towards quantitative or objective analysis of physiological systems via signal analysis. Analysis of these signals using computers has provide greater strength to diagnose, using powerful algorithm for biomedical signal analysis. Various techniques for analysis of biosignals are used, such as: filtering, adaptive noise cancellation, pattern recognition, medical image registration etc. Medical image processing, using techniques such as Xray, MRI and ultrasound scanners, can be viewed as multidimensional signal processing.

2. Biomedical signal acquisition

Bioelectric signals(such as EKG, EMG, EEG, movement, respiration) vary considerably in their amplitude and frequency. Therefore, data acquisition systems require specialized amplifiers and filters for each application. Hence, Biomedical applications demanding real time processing and on-line feedback require high speed, powerful, flexible data acquisition systems[5]. These requirements imposes very hard specifications to the signal acquisition systems to satisfy, which therefore increase the complexity and cost of the device. In addition the acquisition system must guarantee the complete safety of the patient and rejection of any interfering signals. It should also preserve the information contained in the original signal with no introduction of distortion to the input signal[6]. In signal acquisition two most important components are preamplifier and filters. Today, We have systems which

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International Conference on BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING & ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES NIT Jalandhar, Punjab, India (December 17-19, 2010)
provide software control over preamplifier and as well as amplifier and filter portion of the system. These systems are IDAU which contain preamplifier region, filter region, A/D conversion area and digital portion[5]. Preamplifiers, are used mainly for amplification of signal, having high input impedance and high CMRR. Filters are used to reject the unwanted signals which may distort the required signal. Low pass filter is used mainly to limit the frequency band of the biomedical signal and high pass filter is used to block the large dc offset voltage generated by electrodes. Automatic detection of ECG waves is important to cardiac disease diagnosis. SVM is used as classifier for the automatic detection of ECG waves[8]. SVMs based classification method represents a major development in pattern recognition research. SVM is a new paradigm of learning system. In essence, SVM classifiers maximize the margin between training data and the decision boundary, which can be formulated as a quadratic optimization problem in a feature space. The subset of patterns those are closet to the decision boundary are called as support vectors. Here is an algorithm developed for the detection of QRS complex, P and T waves and SVM is used as a classifier[8]. Step 1: A raw digital 12-lead simultaneously recorded ECG signal of a patient is acquired. Step 2: FIR notch filter is used to remove baseline wander, which may produce disturbances in the ECG signal. Step 3: The slope at every sampling instant is calculated to enhance the signal in the region of QRS complex. These slope values are then normalized. Step 4: The input to the support vector classifier is a set of vectors Xi containing twelve normalized slope values, one from each of the twelve leads of ECG at a particular sampling instant. During the training of SVM, a sliding window is moved forward by one sampling instant over the normalized slope curves. When the window lies in the region of QRS complex, the desired output of the SVM is set to 1 and when it lies in the other region, the desired output is set to -1. The SVM is trained on a set of training data covering wide variety of ECG signals with different morphologies of QRS complex picked from CSE ECG database. Step 5: On testing, normalized value of twelve slopes, one from each of the twelve leads of ECG at a sampling instant is used to form the input vector for the SVM. Then the window is moved forward by one sampling instant and a set of twelve slopes, again one from each of the twelve leads of ECG were taken to form next input pattern vector. Fig.1 ECG signal As shown in Fig.1, the first deflection, termed the P-wave is due to the depolarization of the atria. The large QRS-complex[7] is due to the depolarization the ventricles. This is the complex with highest amplitude and it is easy to detect. The last deflection is T-wave corresponds to the ventricular repolarization of the heart. Reliable detection of P and T wave is more difficult due to low amplitudes, low signal-to-noise ratio, amplitude and possible overlapping of the P-wave with T-wave or the QRS complex. Step 6: The QRS complexes detected by the SVM are removed from the ECG signal by replacing them by a base line. Step 7: The ECG signal without QRS complexes is further processed for the detection of T waves. The three main steps, namely slope calculation and normalization, training of SVM and testing of SVM are repeated for the detection of T waves.

3. Biosignal processing technique

3.1. Support vector machine(SVM)
The Electrocardiogram (ECG) is quite an important tool to find out the functional status of the heart. The ECG pattern consists of a recurrent wave sequence of P, QRS and T- wave associated with each beat. The automatic detection of ECG waves is important to cardiac disease diagnosis. In a clinical setting, such as intensive care units, it is essential for automated systems to accurately detect and classify ECG wave components. The correct performance of these systems depends on several important factors, including the quality of the ECG signal.

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International Conference on BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING & ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES NIT Jalandhar, Punjab, India (December 17-19, 2010)
Step 8: The T waves are removed from the QRS-less ECG signal by replacing the T waves by a base line for further processing. Again step 3 to step 5 are repeated on QRS and T waves removed ECG signal for the detection of P waves. 4. The network matches the analyzed signals with some desired outputs.

3.2. Hidden Markov Models

Models are useful tools for random signal processing, When the underlying model of a given signal is known, efficient and sometimes optimal, methods and algorithms may be applied to its processing and parameters estimation. In biomedical, it is very seldom that we have the exact model of the stochastic process under test. One type of stochastic processes, which has found applications in biomedical signal processing, is the Markov Chain Process. A Markov chain stochastic process is a process that is modeled by a finite state machine which consists of a set of N distinct states: 1,2..N The machine is time synchronized, at regularly spaced time instances, it may switch from one state to another, or stay at the same state, according to some transition probabilities.

Fig. 3: Schematic diagram of EMG classification system.

3.4. Other techniques

Techniques, apart from discussed above, can be used for Biosignal processing like STFT and Wavelets transform. In STFT[11], a window function with fixed width is chosen and then this window is slid throughout the whole signal. In this case, the signal inside the window is stationary. Then, the inner product of the signal x(t), inside the window is computed. The wavelets Transform is a signal decomposition on a set of basis functions, obtained by dilations, contractions, and shifts of a unique function, the wavelet prototype[12]. The wavelets Transform has many similarities with the STFT but is fundamentally different in that its wavelet prototypes are not of fixed length. In other words, it is narrow at high frequencies and broad at low frequencies.

Fig. 2: A three states markov chain model Hidden Markov Models[9] have been applied with great success to speech recognition systems. These are applied in Laryngeal Pathologies, Speech disorder detection, Electroencephalography(sleep staging) and Protein Sequence Analysis. Further work is going on for the detection of EEG, EMG, Heart Rate Variability, Bioacoustic signals such as Lung Sounds, Phonocardiogram, blood flow sounds or cough and sore signals, using HMM.

4. BIOMEDICAL SYSTEMS
4.1. Medical Systems
There are various medical systems, which provides online information about the patient condition and after processing displays the result on the screen, like Physiotrace and Boom-NT. Physiotrace[13]: This is a real time toolkit for biomedical data acquisition, centralization, processing and visualization. This toolkit composed of both hardware and software modules, allows users to model , test and perform all king of digital signal processing algorithms for all kind of biomedical signals. This acquisition and treatment board, based on hardware components, a DSP software components library and a visual programming language, represents an efficient solution to develop a complete real time biomedical DSP application, compatible with the commonly available operating systems Microsoft Windows. Boom-NT: It provides the capability to model, simulate and perform various strategies of signal processing using a graphical user interface. It has analog and digital

3.3. Neural Networks

Neural networks can be used for the analysis and classification of biomedical signals due to its good learning ability, adaptability and non linear reparability networks[10]. Fig. 3 shows the schematic diagram of the EMG classification system, which works as follows: 1. The subject makes a particular finger movement. 2. Surface electrodes detect the EMG signals when the finger movements halted then signals are averaged and analyzed by FFT. 3. The FFT analyzed signals are input to the network having input layer of 10 processing elements (10PEs), hidden layer-7-PEs, and output layer-5-PEs.

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International Conference on BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING & ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES NIT Jalandhar, Punjab, India (December 17-19, 2010)
hardware for data acquisition and preprocessing. It also provides standard algorithms for signal processing in the form of module algorithms and these are represented by icons which can be linked together in order to design the desired functionality[14]. Apart from these there wearable biomedical systems[15]. jacket consisting of sensor matrix and transmit their information to processing. are also textile-based It consists of wearable sensing various signals the display for further Similar research is going on processing techniques like hidden markov models to process bioacoustic signals such as lung sounds, blood flow sounds etc. Improvements will take place the way in which the surface electrodes are mounted on the subject skin and the type of electrodes to be used for more efficient results.

6. References
[1] Y. Attikiouzcl, "Biomedical signal Processing: present and future," Proc. Of the Fifth Int. Symposium on Signal Processing and Its Applications, 1999. ISSPA 99, vol. 1, pp.2. [2] G. Bolmsjo, H.Neveryd, and H. Eftring., Robotics in rehabilitation, IEEE Trans. Rehab. Eng. Vol. 3, issue: 1, pp. 77-83. Mar. 1995. [3] M. Kassier, Special Issue on Robotics in Health Care. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 11, no. 6. [4] C. Thornett, Technical aids for the disabled, IEEE Review, vol. 3, issue: 5, pp. 165-168. May 1989. [5] B.S. Drakulic, S.J. Berry, M.N. Gold, and Z.Konstantinovic., A real time data acquisition and signal processing unit for biomedical applications, Proc. Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. Med. Bio. Soc., vol. 3, 1988, pp. 1260-1261. [6] S. Solis-Bustos and J. Silva-Martinez, Design Considerations for biomedical signal interferences, 3rd Int. Workshop on Design of Mixed-Mode Integrated Circuits and Applications, 1999, pp. 187-191. [7] B. U. Kohler, C. Henning, and R. Orglmeister, The principles of software QRS detection, IEEE Eng. In Med. And Bio., pp. 42-47, (2002). [8] S. S. Mehta, N.S. Lingayat, Biomedical Signal Processing Using SVM, ET-UK International Conference on Information and Communication Technology in Electrical Sciences(ICTES 2007), Dec. 2022, 2007, pp. 527-532. [9] A. Cohen, Hidden Markov Models in Biomedical Signal Processing, 20th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Vol. 20, No 3, 1998. [10] A. Hiraiwa, K. Shimohara, and Y. Tokunaga., EMG pattern analysis and classification by neural network, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Syst. Man, Cybern, vol.3, 1989. Pp. 1113-1115. [11] D. Gabor, Theory of Communication, J. IEE, vol. 93, issue: 3, pp. 429-457. 1946.

4.2. Rehabilitate systems

These systems provide the aids to the disabled persons. These system employ biosignals gathered from the brain(EEG) and muscles(EMG) using electrodes and sensors to control two-dimensional cursor movement, left click command etc. These systems provides Human computer interface. These systems differentiate between the various commands on the basis of amplitude thresholds and performing power spectral density estimations on discrete windows of data. This provides an affordable DSP-based system, when combined with the screen keyboard, enables the disabled user to fully operate a computer without using any extremities[16]. Like this there are many other products like EMG-controlled telephone interface to be used by disabled telephone operators[17]. Apart from these systems, The robotics research group at Hiroshima University designed an EMG-based human supporting robot[18]. It consists of an arm control part, a hand and wrist control part, and a graphical feedback display. The hand and wrist part selects an active joint out of four joints D.O.F manipulator and controls it using an impedance model based on the EMG signals. This group also introduced an EMG-based human-robot interface for rehabilitation aid[19]. This system consists of the EMG signal processor, a manipulator, rehabilitation program, and biofeedback. The robotic manipulator is controlled according to this discrimination result.

5. Future scope
The future of biomedical signal processing is very bright and it is still under its early ages. Very intensive research regarding system performance and new processing techniques around the globe. Most concern areas are real time biomedical signal processing systems, converging micro-nano-bio technologies toward integrated biomedical systems, cascade controlling of biomedical systems, wearable systems and designing of distributed autonomous embedded systems for biomedical applications.

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[12] M. Akay and C. Mello., Wavelets for biomedical signal processing, Proc. 19th Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc, vol. 6, 1997, pp. 2688-1691. [13] J. De jonckheere, R. Logier, A. Dassonneville, G. Delmar, C. Vasseur, Physio Trace: An efficient toolkit for biomedical signal processing, proc. Of the 2005 IEEE, Engineering in medicine and Biology 27th annual conference shanghai, china, September 1-4, 2005. [14] Timo Bretschneider, Boris R. Bracio, BOOM-NT: A Visual Tool For Biomedical Signal Processing, proc. 19th international conference- IEEE/EMBS Oct. 30Nov.2, 1997 Chicago, IL. USA. [15] Sungmee Park, Sundaresan Jayaraman, Smart TextileBased Wearable Biomedical Systems: A Transition Plan for Research to Reality, IEEE trans. On Information Technology in Biomedicine, vol. 14, no. 1, January 2010. [16] A. B. Barreto, S.D. Scargle, M.A. Adjouadi,. A practical EMG-based human-computer interface for users with motor disabilities, J Rehabil Res Dev., vol. 37, issue: 1, pp. 53-63. Jan-Feb. 2000. [17] Y. L. Chen, j. S. Lai, J.J. Luh, T.S. Kuo., SEMGcontrolled telephone interface for people with disabilities, J Med Eng. Technical., vol. 26, issue 4, pp. 173-176 Jul-Aug. 2002. [18] O. Fukuda, T. Tsuji, H. Shigeyoshi, and M. Kaneko., An EMG-controlled human supporting robot using neural network. Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. intell. Robot. Syst. IROS 99., vol. 3, 1999, pp. 1586-1591. [19] O. Fukuda, T. Tsuji, H. Shigeyoshi, and M. kaneko., EMG-based human robot interface for rehabilitation aid, Proc. IEEE int. Conf. Robot. Automat., vol. 4, 1998, pp. 3492-3497.

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