Morphology-Preserving Denoising of Exercise ECG Using Adaptive-Filter Supervision and Autoencoder

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


Abstract

Exercise electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings are strongly affected by motion artefacts and muscle noise, while true clean reference signals are often unavailable in real exercise conditions. This study presents a morphology-preserving denoising approach for exercise ECG using a DSP-supervised one-dimensional convolutional neural network autoencoder. In the proposed framework, noisy ECG recordings are used as inputs, while pseudo-reference signals generated by a clinically assessed conventional filtering method are used as supervision targets. The model was validated on a private 48-patient treadmill ECG database sampled at 1 kHz using a patient-wise evaluation strategy to assess its ability to denoise previously unseen noisy ECG recordings. Relative to the DSP pseudo-reference, the proposed framework increased the median signal quality from 5.99dB to 16.22dB, while achieving a median Pearson Correlation Coefficient of 0.988, and preserving clinically relevant beat structure with a median R-peak F1-score of 0.942. These findings indicate that the proposed DSP-supervised autoencoder effectively suppresses exercise-related noise while preserving ECG morphology, highlighting the potential of pseudo-reference-guided deep learning for real-world biomedical signal enhancement when true clean references are unavailable.