Universal Journal of Biomedical Engineering 1(1): 16-21, 2013

DOI: 10.13189/ujbe.2013.010104

http://www.hrpub.org

Optical Magnetometer Employing Adaptive Noise

Cancellation for Unshielded Magnetocardiography
Valentina Tiporlini*, Kamal Alameh
Electron Science Research Institute, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, 6027 WA, Australia
*Corresponding author: vtiporl0@our.ecu.edu.au

Copyright 2013 Horizon Research Publishing All rights reserved.

Abstract This paper demonstrates the concept of an

optical magnetometer for magnetocardiography. The
magnetometer employs a standard Least-Mean-Squares
(LMS) algorithm for heart magnetic field measurement
within unshielded environment. Experimental results show
that the algorithm can extract a weak heart signal from a
much-stronger magnetic noise and detect the P, QRS, and T
heart features and completely suppress the common power
line noise component at 50 Hz.

damaged skin, such as acute burns. Techniques based on

magnetic fields measurements offer a simple non-invasive
method for the collection of electrophysiological waveforms
without any physical contact between the device and the
patient, and hence, problems arising from skin-electrode
contact are avoided. Furthermore, magnetocardiography
(MCG) has been shown to be more accurate than
electrocardiography for the (i) diagnosis of atrial and
ventricular hypertrophy, (ii) non-invasive location of the
hearts conduction pathways, (iii) the identification of spatial
Keywords Magnetocardiography; Optical Magnetometry; current dispersion patterns, and (iv) the detection of circular
Adaptive
Noise
Cancellation;
Least-Mean-Squares vortex currents which give no ECG signal [1]. Cardiac
Algorithm
magnetic fields surround the human body and are typically
very low in magnitude (about 100 pT for adults [2] and
between 5 to 10 pT for a fetus [3]). Therefore, the
measurement of a very weak heart-generated magnetic field
1. Introduction
requires high sensitivity magnetometers. Furthermore, the
The human heart is made of conductive tissues that produce environmental electromagnetic noise is typically much
both an electric field and a magnetic field, depending on stronger than the cardiac magnetic field necessitating the
cardiac activity. Measuring the electric and/or magnetic fields magnetocardiographic measurements to be run inside a
enables various heart parameters as well as diseases to be magnetically-shielded room, thus making conventional
diagnosed, such as heart beat rate and arrhythmia. In magnetometers expensive and impractical for dynamic
particular, fetal heart rate monitoring is crucial not only for hospital environments.
Typically superconducting quantum interference devices
collecting useful information on the wellbeing of a pregnancy
(SQUID)
that have a demonstrate sensitivity of the order of
but also for the early diagnosis of fetal distress and a prompt
[4] are used in magnetocardiography. Optical
fT/Hz
intervention in case of adverse events. Electrocardiography
magnetometers
that use the magnetically dependent optical
(ECG) enables the detection of heart-generated electric fields
property
of
certain
media have demonstrated sensitivities as
through electrodes placed on the surface of the human body,
high as those of SQUID based magnetometers and start to be
so that only the effects of currents flowing through the body
vastly used in magnetocardiography [5]. Moreover, SQUID
tissues are detected. These currents are affected by local
based magnetometers must be operated at very low
inhomogeneities due to discontinuities of the electric
temperatures, thus requiring cumbersome and expensive
conductivity in the body tissues, such as fat layers or bones cooling mechanisms. Optical magnetometers have the
that act as spatial low-pass filters. Furthermore, ECG has advantage of working at room temperature and also have the
disadvantages related to skin-electrode contacts, including: (i) potential of miniaturization (they can be fitted in a volume of
measurement dependence upon the position of the electrodes, 1mm3 [6, 7]), making them more practical for many
(ii) addition of electrode-contact noise due to loss of applications. The main problem of magnetocardiography is
adherence between the electrode and the skin, (iii) motion the environmental electromagnetic noise, generated by the
artifacts caused by the skin and electrode interface and power supply and electronic devices, that is typically much
electrode cable and (iv) unsuitability for patients with higher (in the order of nT) than the heart-generated magnetic
field. This results in an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, if
patients are examined outside a magnetic shielded room.

Universal Journal of Biomedical Engineering 1(1): 16-21, 2013

17

Figure 1. Experiment setup that demonstrates the principle of the proposed optical magnetometer.

The aim of operating the magnetocardiographic system in

magnetically noisy environments creates the need for
developing effective noise suppressing techniques. Magnetic
noise suppression in magnetically unshielded environments
has been demonstrated based on the use of an array of
magnetometers. For example, the performance of a
multichannel system based on SQUID magnetometry in an
unshielded environment has been shown to be comparable
with magnetic field measurements performed inside a
shielded room [8]. The application of an efficient noise
cancellation system based on adaptive signal processing has
been used to improve the measurement of SQUID based
magnetocardiographic signals in an unshielded environment
[9].
In this paper, we propose and demonstrate the concept of an
optically-pumped quantum magnetometer capable of
measuring a cardiac magnetic signal in unshielded
environment. We particularly adopt a standard adaptive
Least-Mean-Squares (LMS) algorithm, which has commonly
been used in electrocardiography for removing low spectral
noise components [10, 11]. The paper is organized as follows:
in Section II, the optically-pumped quantum magnetometer
and the adaptive noise cancellation system used for heart beat
sensing are described; in Section III experimental results are
reported and discussed and concluding remarks are presented
in Section IV.

2. Optical Magnetometer
Conventional optically-pumped quantum magnetometers
are based on the use of the atomic-spin-dependent optical
properties of a medium. The principle of operation of

optically-pumped quantum magnetometers is described in

detail in [12]. A circularly polarized laser light transmitted
through a glass cell containing a vapor of alkali atoms (e.g.,
Cesium) resonates when its frequency equals to the first
absorption line of the alkali atoms. This creates a spin
alignment that precesses with a frequency proportional to the
modulus of an externally applied magnetic field, B0. This
precession frequency is called Larmor frequency and is
defined as: wL = |B0|, where is the gyromagnetic constant,
which has a value of 2 3.5 Hz/nT for Cesium. If this
precession is coherently driven by a radiofrequency (rf)
magnetic field, Brf (oscillating at frequency wrf), the
absorption coefficient of the alkali medium changes, thus
modulating the transmitted optical intensity.
Such
magnetometers are known as Mx magnetometers because the
rf oscillating magnetic field supplied to the vapor atoms
modulates the x component of the magnetization vector inside
the vapor cell [13]. The phase difference between the driving
rf signal and the probe light transmitted through the vapor cell
gives a direct measurement of the Larmor frequency.
We adopt the Mx magnetometer configuration shown in
Figure 1, through an experimental setup, which is similar to
that described in [14] with one key difference, which is the
addition of one cell that senses the environmental noise. A
3-D electromagnet system was used to generate a dc magnetic
field that cancels the geomagnetic field and supplies a
uniform magnetic field thus producing appropriate
magnetization vector along the z-direction inside the two
vapor cells. The used electromagnet consisted of two parts: (i)
a 3-D DC coils of dimension 580mm530mm640mm
providing a magnetic field with a uniformity better than 1% in
the central region; and (ii) an additional pair of coils that

18

Optical Magnetometer Employing Adaptive Noise Cancellation for Unshielded Magnetocardiography

generate a small-magnitude rf magnetic field along the x axis.

Each coil-pair of the electromagnet was independently driven
by a digital power supply to cancel the geomagnetic field
along the x and y directions, and generate a uniform magnetic
field along the z-axis. The intensity of the magnetic field at
the center of the electromagnet was 8T, as measured by a
Honeywell HMR2300 three-axes smart digital magnetometer.
The AC coils were driven by a waveform generator to
produce an rf magnetic field of intensity of 200nT, oscillating
at a frequency of 28 kHz along the x-axis. Two vapor cells,
which constituted the core of the instrument, were placed in
the center of the electromagnet and used to implement a noise
cancellation system, since it required two sensors to measure
the heart magnetic field and the environmental noise. In
addition to Cesium vapor, Neon at 34Torr and Argon at 6Torr
were added to the cells in order to reduce atom collisions. The
cells diameter and length were 21mm and 75mm, respectively,
yielding a spatial resolution of about 53mm, when tilted by 45
with respect to the z-axis. The distance between the cells was
made 10cm to assure that the reference cell is not affected by
the cardiac signal. In the experiments, the gas pressure inside
the cells was increased by increasing the cells temperature
through hot water flowing into a silicon pipe wrapped around
the cells. The temperature of the vapor cells was increased to
37C, which corresponds to the typical human body
temperature. An external-cavity semiconductor laser was
used as the light source for both pumping and probing. The
laser wavelength was tuned to 894nm which corresponds to
the Cesium D1 absorption line F=4F=3 transition, and
stabilized using saturation spectroscopy in an auxiliary cell.
The frequency-stabilized light was coupled into a
single-mode polarization maintaining optical fiber of 5m
core diameter, collimated at 1.6mm diameter, split to two
laser beams using a polarization beam splitter (PBS). The two
laser beams are then circularly polarized using two
quarter-wave plates, and then transmitted through the vapor
cells inside the electromagnet. The power of each laser beam
before transmission through the corresponding vapor cell was
20W. After emergence from the vapor cells, the output laser
beams were focused and detected by two optical receivers,
which were placed outside the electromagnet in order to
reduce the magnetic interference produced by the
transimpedance amplifier of each photodiode package.
Finally, the phase shifts between the photocurrents detected
by the photodiodes with respect to the oscillating rf magnetic
field were measured using a lock-in amplifier. These
measured phase shift signals were used as the input noisy
signal and noise reference for an adaptive noise cancellation
system based on standard LMS algorithm.
Adaptive noise suppression techniques are typically based
on adaptive filtering and require very little or no prior
knowledge of the signal of interest. To suppress the noise, a
reference input signal is required, which is typically derived
from one or more magnetic sensors placed at positions where
the noise level is higher than the signal amplitude. Figure 2
shows a block diagram of an adaptive noise canceller applied
to a generic magnetic heart field measurement. The primary

input to the canceller, denoted d(k), is the sum of the signal of

interest s(k) and the noise n(k), which is typically
uncorrelated with s(k). The reference input signal of the
system, x(k), is a noise that is correlated in some unknown
way with n(k), but uncorrelated with the signal of interest
s(k).

Figure 2. Typical block diagram of an adaptive noise canceller.

As shown in Figure 2, x(k) is adaptively filtered to produce

a replica of the noise n(k) that can be subtracted from the
primary input to eventually produce an output signal e(k)
equals to s(k). The objective of the noise canceller is to
minimize the mean-squared error between the primary input
signal, d(k), and the output of the filter, y(k) [15].
Referring to Figure 2, the output signal is given by

e( k ) = d ( k ) y ( k ) = s ( k ) + n ( k ) y ( k )

(1)

Therefore, the mean-squared of e(k) is given by

E e2 (k ) = E s 2 (k ) + E

{( n(k ) y(k ) ) }
2

(2)

+ 2 E {s ( k ) ( n( k ) y (k ) )}

Since s(k) is uncorrelated with n(k) and y(k), the last term in
(2) is zero, yielding:

E e2 ( k ) = E s 2 ( k ) + E ( n ( k ) y ( k ) )

(3)

It is noticed from (3) that the mean-squared error is minimum

when n(k) = y(k), and hence, when the output signal e(k) is
equal to the desired signal s(k).
The LMS algorithm aims to minimize the mean-squared
error by calculating the gradient of the squared-error with
respect to the coefficients of the filter. Assuming that the
adaptive filter is a FIR filter of order M, then (1) becomes:

e( k ) =
d (k ) i =0 bi x(k i )
M 1

(4)

Universal Journal of Biomedical Engineering 1(1): 16-21, 2013

19

Figure 3. a) Heart signal generated using a heart waveform generator. The typical P wave, QRS complex and T wave, are clearly displayed, which correspond
to atrial depolarization, ventricular depolarization and ventricular repolarization, respectively; b) spectrum of the generated heart signal, which is mainly
concentrated at low frequencies (from DC to 60Hz); c) signal measured by the sensor close to the heart; d) spectrum of the signal measured by the sensor
closest to the heart (red arrows point to the low-frequency components of the heart signal); e) noise measured by the reference sensor and f) spectrum of the
noise measured by the reference sensor.

The updating procedure is applied on coefficients bi

according to the following rule [16]:

bi( k +1) =
bi( k ) + 2 e(k ) x(k i )

(5)

where i = 0,1,,M-1, k is the iteration index and is the step

size that indicates the adaption rate of the algorithm and is
usually included in the range (0,1]. The LMS algorithm can
have high convergence time especially if the noise to be
removed is much larger than the signal. To increase the
convergence speed, a variable adaption rate can be used. This
is a variant of the LMS algorithm called normalized LMS.
Equation (5) now can be written [16]:
bi( k +1) =
bi( k ) + 2 k e(k ) x(k i )
(6)

=
where k

n
,
2
x(k )

0 < n < 2

The normalization of the LMS step size by x(k)2 typically

reduces the convergence time.
It is important to mention that all the experimental results

reported below were performed outside of a magnetically

shielded room in laboratory environment, which was
contaminated with a high level of electromagnetic noise. This
noise is attributed to various electric equipments, such as
power supplies, computers, transmitters for wireless network
and mobile phones. Typically, optical Mx magnetometers
operate in phase-locked mode with a feedback loop
implemented between the lock-in amplifier phase output and
the driver of the AC coils. Specifically, the rf frequency is
locked to the cell that measures the environmental noise [17].
This approach enables the signal measured by the
close-to-the-heart cell to sense the change due to the heart
field only with minimum noise contamination. Our novel
approach is based on operating the Mx magnetometer in a
free-running mode without the use of feedback between the
lock-in amplifier and the rf driver. This method assures a
high-level of correlation between the noisy signal and noise
reference, and makes the noise cancellation more efficient in
accurately recovering the heart signal. A heart signal
spectrum typically spreads over a bandwidth of at least 60 Hz.

20

Optical Magnetometer Employing Adaptive Noise Cancellation for Unshielded Magnetocardiography

The main problem in the proposed free-running mode

configuration of the Mx magnetometer was the limited
bandwidth of the magnetometer. This issue was overcome
by setting the time constant of the output filter of the lock-in
amplifier to 1 second. The process that was used for the
extraction of the heart signal from the noise was based on (i)
recording the phase shift signals from the lock-in amplifiers
over a period of around 8 seconds, (ii) processing the recorded
signals offline using the LMS algorithm and the normalized
LMS algorithm to recover the heart signal, (iii) repeating
steps (i) and (ii) for different time periods (more than 50
times), and (iv) calculating the average of the extracted
signals to obtain the final heart signal.

depolarization and ventricular repolarization, respectively.

Figure 3 (b) shows the spectrum of the cardiac signal that
typically spreads over low frequencies, exactly between DC
to 60Hz. Figures 3 (c and d) show the waveform and the
corresponding spectrum of the signal detected by the sensor
that was close to the heart, named Signal Sensor in Figure 2.
Figures 3 (e and f) display the waveform and the
corresponding spectrum of the reference noise detected by the
other sensor, named Noise Sensor in Figure 2. The waveforms
shown in Figures 3 (c and e) are the main input signals needed
to recover the heart signal by the noise cancellation algorithm.
From Figure 3 (c) is obvious that the noise is much stronger
than the heart signal, making the heart beat unremarkable.
As shown from Figures 3 (d and f), the main source of noise in
the frequency range of interest is the interference at 50 Hz
produced by power lines. However, the low-frequency
components of the heart signal are clearly seen in Figure 3 (d)
(pointed to by the red arrows). Since the heart signal is
concentrated in the DC-60Hz range, both inputs of the noise
canceller were filtered using a low pass filter with a cutoff
frequency of 90 Hz.

Figure 4. Magnetic heart signals extracted by (a) LMS algorithm and (b)
normalized LMS algorithm.

3. Experimental Results and Discussion

A test coil was placed inside the electromagnet system to
simulate the human heart activity. The distance between the
test coil and the center of the vapor cell was 5cm. A waveform
generator was used to produce a cardiac signal and drive the
test coil. The frequency of the generated cardiac test field was
1.2 Hz, which corresponds to the typical human heart rate of
70 beats per minute. Figure 3 (a) shows the waveform of the
generated heart signal where the typical cardiac features are
clearly displayed, namely, P wave, QRS complex and T wave,
which correspond to atrial depolarization, ventricular

Figure 5. Spectrum of the heart signal extracted by (a) LMS algorithm and
(b) normalized LMS algorithm.

Figures 4 (a and b) show the cardiac signal extracted from

the signals displayed in Figures 3 (c and e) using the adaptive
noise canceller based, respectively, on (i) LMS algorithm and
(ii) normalized LMS algorithm. It is important to note that the

Universal Journal of Biomedical Engineering 1(1): 16-21, 2013

results shown in Figure 4 were averaged over 50

measurements. Both the LMS algorithm and the normalized
LMS algorithm were capable of clearly detecting the QRS
complex, enabling the prediction of the heart rate. Note that
the P and T waves were better identified with the normalized
LMS algorithm. Figures 5 (a and b) show the spectra of the
heart signals recovered by the LMS algorithm and the
normalized LMS algorithm, respectively. It is obvious that
while both algorithms successfully recovered the heart
waveform, the normalized LMS algorithm outperformed the
LMS algorithm in canceling the noise component at 50Hz.
The experimental demonstrator successfully recovered a
heart signal (simulated with a test coil) as well as all its typical
features in an unshielded environment, with the recovered
signal being comparable to those recovered by ECG and
MCG systems working inside a shielded room.

4. Conclusion
An Mx-configuration-based optically-pumped quantum
magnetometer employing two sensing cells in conjunction
with a standard LMS-algorithm-based adaptive noise
canceller has been developed, and its capability of measuring
heart generated magnetic fields has been experimentally
demonstrated in magnetically-unshielded environment. The
use of LMS and normalized LMS algorithms has been
investigated for suppressing the power line generated 50Hz
interference and recovering of heart waveforms. Both
algorithms have successfully detected the P, QRS, and T heart
features. However, the normalized LMS algorithm has
outperformed the LMS algorithm in the cancellation of 50Hz
noise component. The results shown in this paper are useful
for signal processing in magnetocardiographic system
operating in unshielded environment.

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