An ECG Signal Denoising Method Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Net

In this paper, a novel denoising method for electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is proposed to improve performance and availability under multiple noise cases. The method is based on the framework of conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN), and we improved the CGAN framework for ECG denoising. The proposed framework consists of two networks: a generator that is composed of the optimized convolutional auto-encoder (CAE) and a discriminator that is composed of four convolution layers and one full connection layer. As the convolutional layers of CAE can preserve spatial locality and the neighborhood relations in the latent higher-level feature representations of ECG signal, and the skip connection facilitates the gradient propagation in the denoising training process, the trained denoising model has good performance and generalization ability. The extensive experimental results on MIT-BIH databases show that for single noise and mixed noises, the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of denoised ECG signal is above 39 dB, and it is better than that of the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the denoised classification results of four cardiac diseases show that the average accuracy increased above 32 % under multiple noises under SNR=0 dB. So, the proposed method can remove noise effectively as well as keep the details of the features of ECG signals.