The Use of Empirical Mode Decomposition for Physiological Artifacts Suppression from Electroencephalogram Signals

An electroencephalogram is a biomedical signal, which represents changes in the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex. EEG signals are widely used in clinical practice for diagnosis and monitoring of the body state. Most of the biomedical signals, including EEG signals, are low-level, so their recording process is accompanied by various interferences of physical and physiological origin. Such interferences are called artifacts. Their influence significantly distorts the useful signal, which leads to serious problems in its analysis and reduces its diagnostic potential. Moreover, a number of artifacts can not only distort the signal, making it impossible to use, but also imitate undesirable pathological activity or cause incorrect behavior of signal processing algorithms. The suppression of artifacts of physiological origin is a very difficult task. At the moment, the search for a universal and effective method for solving this task has not yet been solved and remains urgent. This paper discusses the application of Empirical Mode Decomposition and some of its modifications to suppress the main physiological artifacts of EEG signals.