A novel approach to ECG signal analysis using higher-order spectrum

Abstract

In practice, many medical signals show significant nonlinear and non-Gaussian characteristics, such as presence of non-Linear effects of phase coupling among the signal frequency components. The methods based on spectral analysis fail to properly deal with the nonlinearity and non-Gaussianility of the process but HOS allows us to effectively process this kind of signals to obtain their higher-order statistics. Bispectral estimation has been shown to be a very useful tool for extracting the degree of quadratic phase coupling ( QPC) between individual frequency components of the process.