Artifacts suppression using independent component analysis from the measured magnetocardiogram

Magnetocardiography(MCG) is a non-invasive technique, complimentary to the electrocardiography (ECG), and measures the magnetic field associated with the electrical activity of the heart using Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUID) which have unparalleled sensitivity for the detection of weak magnetic fields. But a detailed analysis of MCG data is often limited by interference from extraneous noise, which may even dominate the MCG data. In most previous works, the step involving the elimination of noise was implemented using filtering. Conventional filtering cannot always fully address the problem of signal processing in terms of extracting specific signals due to particular biological sources of interest such as human heart. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of independent component analysis (ICA) to suppress the artifacts from the MCG recordings acquired using SQUID sensors coupled to axial gradiometers.