Techniques for detection and classification of the fetal QRS complex

A critical process in both the fetal cardiotocogram (CTG) and fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) analysis is to determine the location of the QRS complex from the raw FECG data. Difficulties arise because the FECG signal is degraded and sometimes totally obscured by noise. Thus, to determine the location of the QRS complexes is a two stage process: pre-processing of the noisy FECG to detect candidate QRS complexes, and pattern recognition to classify these as genuine QRS complexes or noise. The authors compare an ANN technique with conventional techniques for both pre-processing and pattern recognition of the FECG.