Methods to evaluate the performance of fetal electrocardiogram extraction algorithms

One of the main problems for the evaluation of fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) extraction algorithms is the difficulty in giving objective measurements of the quality of the recovered signals, and therefore of the proposed extraction method. This is the reason why most of the papers determine the behavior of a certain algorithm by visual inspection criteria. We propose the use of simulated registers and the definition of indexes that determine the quality of an extraction algorithm, without requiring visual inspection. This way, we can have objective measurements to determine the quality of an algorithm or we can have a criterion to fix the operational parameters of the method that show better performance.