A technique for suppressing the transient states of IIR notch filter is investigated. This technique uses the vector projection to find better initial values for notch filters. When a notch or comb filter is used to eliminate power line (AC) interference in the recording of electrocardiograms (ECG), the performance of the notch filter with transient suppression is better than that of the conventional notch filter with arbitrary initial condition. The improvements with this technique are at the cost of additional computation load at the beginning of filtering.<>