On the use of singular value decomposition for QRS detection and ECG denoising

Abstract QRS detection is a pre-processing step to detect the heartbeat in an electrocardiogram (ECG) for subsequent rhythm classification. However, measured ECG waveforms may differ as a result of intrinsic variability or due to artefacts or noise. If the signals are distorted, then this often leads to difficulties in QRS detection. Of course, a high QRS detection performance is an important part of an ECG analysis algorithm, and furthermore, it must work even for highly noisy signals. Singular value decompositon (SVD) is the factorization of a matrix into the product three matrices. SVD allows us to find important components of data and, thus, can be used for dimension reduction or denoising. We introduce SVD based methods for QRS detection and ECG denoising, especially for short unknown signal segments, and show application results.