Introduction to LABVIEW and Virtual Instruments

Mohammad Rizki Dwiatma (081611733038)

Lecturer: Akif Rahmatillah, S.T., M.T.
Medical Instrumentation Practice
Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universitas Airlangga
ABSTRACT
LabVIEW stands for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench. LabVIEW is a
programming software produced by National instruments with block-diagram-based. In this study,
ECG signals with some noises including power noise with a frequency of 50 Hz with an amplitude of
0.1 mV and white noise with an amplitude of 0.1 mV are simulated. Using LabVIEW, filtering and
denoising is conducted using virtual instruments such as band-stop filter and undecimated wavelet
transform. The ECG signal result is smooth with less ripple.
Keywords: ECG Signal, Filter, LabVIEW, Wavelet Transform.

INTRODUCTION mainly caused by electromagnetic interference

by power line, electromagnetic field by the
In this study, Laboratory Virtual Environment
nearby machines, stray effect of the alternating
Workbench (LabVIEW) is used to simulate
current fields due to loops in the cables, or by
some virtual instruments. LabVIEW is a
improper grounding of patient or the ECG
programming software that is created by
machine itself. In addition, white Gaussian
National Instruments. LabVIEW offers a
noise with an amplitude of 0.1 mV was also
unique programming concept that is block-
added. White noise is occurred when ECG
diagram-based. A simulation of ECG signals
signal is transmitted through poor channel
with some noises and the process to obtain the
condition.
clean signals will be conducted using virtual
signal processing tools that are provided in MATERIALS AND METHODS
LabVIEW. The LabVIEW program is known
At first, it is important to make sure that
as VI or Virtual Instruments because its
Advanced Signal Processing add-on (ASP) is
appearance and operation can simulate an
installed, before the installation of biomedical
instrument.
toolkit is conducted. In order to develop the
The ECG is defined as recording of the heart’s program, all required functions must be
electrical activity. Its signal generated by the performed in the block diagram. There is also a
heart muscle are measured by the leads on the platform called GUI to control the work of the
skin surface of the body. ECG signal lies in the block diagrams.
range of 0.05-100 Hz. It is low in amplitude and
In this project, firstly the ECG signals are
is affected by different types of noises and
simulated using a tool that is included inside
interferences as ECG is a very sensitive signal.
biomedical toolkit. Sampling rate of the ECG is
Due to the noise and interference, correct
set on 512 Hz. The output of ECG simulator is
diagnosis of the ECG signal will not take place.
connected to the next block diagram, including
Therefore, it is very important to remove the
signal processing and indicator graph to show
noise and interference from the signal.
the ECG signal.
In this project, power noise with a frequency of
50 Hz with an amplitude of 0.1 mV were added
to the ECG signal. This power interference is
 The connection between output signal ECG and
the band-stop filter is shown as below:

Output signal of ECG will be connected to a

filter or another signal processing block. In this
study, bandstop filter is used, along with a
wavelet denoiser to eliminate the power line
interference and white noise signal. The final The result of the ECG signal after filtering is
signal will be displayed in a graph. shown as below:

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In this program, the power line interference
noise is eliminated using band-stop filter.
Band-stop filter is a series combination of high
and low-pass filter. This type of filter
eliminates the noise which lies in specific range
such as 50 Hz or 60 Hz as power line
interference. Notch filter is a special type of
band-stop filter that eliminates power line
noise. In the band-stop filter of the program,
low cut-off frequency was set at 49 Hz. and was
set at 51 Hz as the high cut-off frequency.
Therefore, 50 Hz in this program will be
removed. Butterworth type is chosen, because
in this type, the result of amplitude response
will not produce as much ripple as it was in
chebysev or elliptic, even with weaker The next part of signal processing block is
attenuation. To resolve this low attenuation, the denoising the signal using wavelet denoise.
order of the filter is raised to level 8, giving White noise has uniform power across a
enough attenuation to make sure the power line varying frequency band. Knowing this, the
interference that lies within the frequency of 50 method we used to eliminate the power noise
Hz is eliminated. earlier cannot be conducted, since the white
noise do not have the exact frequency band
where it lies within. To overcome this, wavelet
transform can be used as a decomposition of a
signal in the time-frequency scale plane. In this
program, undecimated wavelet transform is
used because it does not incorporate the down-
sampling operations. Moreover, it is better than
discrete wavelet transform that cause shift
variance of the wavelet transform when
decimating. The result of wavelet denoise is
shown as below:
Haar-type UWT is chosen because it gives the
best and the most-smooth signal than the
others. The level is set to 5 to make sure that the
peaks of ECG signal are not reduced much. The
connection between filtered signal and the
wavelet denoise is show as below:
The result of wavelet denoise, as well as our
final ECG signal is shown as below:
The result shows that the filter and denoiser
work well on the acquired signal, since the
ripples have been eliminated. One thing
remaining that should be fixed is the baseline
wander.
CONCLUSION
The study includes the findings of some
techniques on ECG signal denoising, with the
types of observed noises is power line
interference and white Gaussian noise.
Butterworth band-stop filter is a good choice to
filter 50 or 60 Hz power line interference. In the
other hand, Undecimated Wavelet
Transformation is a good choice for a random
noise such as white noise, since the denoising
process works in time-frequency domain.
REFERENCES
C.Saritha, V.Sukanya and Y.Narasimha
Murthy, "ECG signal analysis using wavelet
transforms," Bulgarian Journal of Physics, vol.
35, pp. 68-77, 2008.
R. Coifman and D. Donoho, "Translation
invariant de-noising," in Lecture Notes in
Statistics: Wavelets and Statistics, vol. New
York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 125--150, 1995
Snehal Thalkar, Prof. Dhananjay Upasani
“Various Techniques for Removal of Power
Line Interference From ECG Signal”
International Journal of Scientific &
Engineering Research, Volume 4, Issue 12,
December-2013 12 ISSN 2229-5518.