A Simultaneous ECG-PCG Acquisition System with Real-Time Burst-Adaptive Noise Cancellation

Abstract: Cardiac auscultation is an essential clinical skill, requiring excellent hearing to distinguish subtle differences in timing and pitch of heart sounds. However, diagnosing solely from these sounds is often challenging due to interference from surrounding noise, and the information may be limited. Existing solutions that adaptively cancel external noise are either not real-time or are computationally intensive, making them unsuitable for implementation in a portable system. This work proposes an end-to-end system with a real-time adaptive noise cancellation pipeline integrated into a device that simultaneously acquires electrocardiogram (ECG) and phonocardiogram (PCG) signals. The performance of the system is validated using real-world hospital noise datasets and recordings captured with the dual-modality device. For PCG and ECG signals recorded from the device in noisy hospital settings, the proposed algorithms achieved signal-to-noise ratio improvements of 37.01 dB and 30.32 dB, respectively. These results demonstrate the systems effectiveness in enabling reliable and accessible cardiac screening, including noisy hospital environments typical of resource-constrained settings.