Morphology-Preserving Denoising of Exercise ECG Using Adaptive-Filter Supervision and a 1D CNN Auto-encoder

Abdulhamed Mohammed Jasim, Noor Qaqos, Shamsu Idris Abdullahi, Ekenedirichukwu Nelson Obianom, Fan Feng, G. Andre Ng, Xin Li
University of Leicester


Abstract

Recording electrocardiogram (ECG) signals during treadmill exercise is strongly affected by electrode motion and muscle artefacts, and in many sce-narios, reference ECG signals are unavailable, making it difficult for super-vised algorithms to train. To address this issue, this approach proposes a hy-brid framework that integrates traditional DSP with deep learning techniques for ECG denoising and preserving the signal morphology. First, the autoen-coder uses the noisy exercise data as input signals, while the denoised signals are used as targets. The target signals are generated using our previously pub-lished hybrid adaptive filtering approach (Jasim et al., 2025). After a one-time training of the 1D CNN autoencoder, new ECG recordings can be de-noised by a single forward pass through the network, avoiding repeated adap-tive filtering. The proposed approach was evaluated using a private exercise ECG dataset from 48 subjects sampled at 1000 Hz. This database is collec-tion of patients suffering from ischaemic cardiomyopathy, who were under-going an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) implant and treadmill exercise testing. ECG recordings were segmented into fixed 5s windows and split subject-wise into training, validation, and test sets (38/4/6 subjects) to avoid data leakage. Regarding the test set, the proposed model achieved a mean normalized RMSE of 0.1206 ± 0.0566 and a mean normalized PRD of 14.90% ± 9.08%. In terms of signal quality, the average SNR increased from 4.22 ± 4.39 dB to 14.40 ± 3.74 dB, corresponding to an average SNR im-provement of 10.18 ± 3.89 dB. These results show that the proposed ap-proach rapidly and effectively learns ECG features and preserves the signal morphology, supporting effective noise removal for exercise ECG in the ab-sence of true ground truth.