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. 2025 Nov 21:199:111319.
doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2025.111319. Online ahead of print.

Self-supervised autoencoder network for robust heart rate extraction from noisy photoplethysmogram: Applying blind source separation to biosignal analysis

Matthew B Webster  1 , Dongheon Lee  2 , Joonnyong Lee  3
Affiliations

Self-supervised autoencoder network for robust heart rate extraction from noisy photoplethysmogram: Applying blind source separation to biosignal analysis

Matthew B Webster et al. Comput Biol Med. .

Abstract

Biosignals can be viewed as mixtures measuring particular physiological events, and blind source separation (BSS) aims to extract underlying source signals from mixtures. This paper proposes a self-supervised multi-encoder autoencoder (MEAE) to separate heartbeat-related source signals from photoplethysmogram (PPG), enhancing heart rate (HR) detection in noisy PPG data. The MEAE is trained on PPG signals from a large open polysomnography database without any pre-processing or data selection. The trained network is then applied to a noisy PPG dataset collected during the daily activities of nine subjects and a surgical dataset comprising 4,681 patients. The extracted heartbeat-related source signal significantly improves HR detection as compared to the original PPG. The absence of pre-processing and the self-supervised nature of the proposed method, combined with its strong performance, highlight the potential of MEAE for BSS in biosignal analysis.

Keywords: Biosignal processing; Blind source separation; Denoising; Heart rate detection; Photoplethysmogram; Self-supervised learning.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Matthew B. Webster reports a relationship with Mellowing Factory Co Ltd that includes: employment. Joonnyong Lee reports a relationship with Mellowing Factory Co Ltd that includes: board membership, employment, and equity or stocks. Matthew B. Webster has patent pending to Mellowing Factory Co Ltd. Joonnyong Lee has patent pending to Mellowing Factory Co Ltd. Dongheon Lee has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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