AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

Dissertation submitted in the fufillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master in Biomedical Engineering Automated techniques for biosignal data acquisition and analysis have become increasingly powerful, particularly at the Biomedical Engineering research field. Nevertheless, it is verified the need to improve tools for signal pattern recognition and classification systems, in which the detection of specific events and the automatic signal segmentation are preliminary processing steps. The present dissertation introduces a signal-independent algorithm, which detects significant events in a biosignal. From a time series morphological analysis, the algorithm computes the instants when the most significant standard deviation discontinuities occur, segmenting the signal. An iterative optimization step is then applied. This assures that a minimal error is achieved when modeling these segments with polynomial regressions. The adjustment of a scale factor gives different detail levels of events detection. An accurate and objective algorithm performance evaluation procedure was designed. When applied on a set of synthetic signals, with known and quantitatively predefined events, an overall mean error of 20 samples between the detected and the actual events showed the high accuracy of the proposed algorithm. Its ability to perform the detection of signal activation onsets and transient waveshapes was also assessed, resulting in higher reliability than signal-specific standard methods. Some case studies, with signal processing requirements for which the developed algorithm can be suitably applied, were approached. The algorithm implementation in real-time, as part of an application developed during this research work, is also reported. The proposed algorithm detects significant signal events with accuracy and significant noise immunity. Its versatile design allows the application in different signals without previous knowledge on their statistical properties or specific preprocessing steps. It also brings added objectivity when compared with the exhaustive and time-consuming examiner analysis. The tool introduced in this dissertation represents a relevant contribution in events detection, a particularly important issue within the wide digital biosignal processing research field.