A flexible approach for simulating physiological signals.

ABSTRACT

Generating synthetic physiological signals using information extracted from real world physiological signals plays an important role in the field of medical device development and education. Most of the existing approaches are limited in the sense that they either focus on a particular physiological signal or lack flexibility in generating signals that mimic real world scenarios. In this paper, we present a cubic B-Spline interpolator-based flexible signal generator intended for simulating a variety of physiological signals. A simulated artifact generator (SAG) is also included in the proposed scheme to add artifacts to the physiological signals mimicking signal deviations associated with real world scenarios. In addition, the proposed method offers the ability to easily present a parametric representation to model a case-specific physiological signal. To demonstrate the ability of the proposed method, case studies on electromyogram (EMG), electro-oculogram (EOG), and electrocardiogram (ECG) during ventricular fibrillation are presented. Using a database of 20 ECG signals, the proposed approach was compared with an existing-model-based method and the results confirm the flexibility of our proposed approach as well as higher signal reproduction accuracy (a mean root mean square error improvement of 47.9% for waveform-based modeling and 4.3% for parametric-based modeling).