Copyright © 2009 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a new technique suitable for separating independent components from electrocardiogram (ECG) complex signals. The basic idea of using multidimensional independent component analysis (MICA) is to find stable higher dimensional source signal subspaces and to decompose each rotation into elementary rotations within all two-dimensional planes spanned by the coordinate axes useful for diagnostic information of heart. In this paper, ability of ICA for parameterization of ECG signals was felt to reduce the amount of redundant ECG data. This work aims at finding an independent subspace analysis (ISA) model for ECG analysis that allows applicability to any random vectors available in an ECG data set. For the common standards for electrocardiography (CSE) based ECG data sets, joint approximate diagonalization of eigen matrices (Jade) algorithm is used to find smaller subspaces. The extracted independent components are further cleaned by statistical measures. In this study, it is also observed that the value of kurtosis coefficients for the independent components, which represents the noise component, can be further reduced using parameterized multidimensional ICA (PMICA) technique. The indeterminacies if available in the ECG data are to be analysed also using modified version of Jade algorithm to PMICA and parameterized standard ICA (PsICA) for comparative studies. The indeterminacies if available in the ECG data are reduced in PMICA better in comparison to the analysis done using PsICA. The simulation results obtained indicate that ICA definitely improves signal–noise ratio (SNR) like the other higher order digital filtering methods like Kalman, Butterworth etc. with minimum reconstruction errors. Here, it is also confirmed that re-parameterization of the standard ICA model results into a ‘component model’ using MICA technique, which is geometric in spirit and free of indeterminacies existing in sICA model.