Combined method for fetal electrocardiogram extraction from noninvasive abdominal recordings

Abdominal electrocardiogram (AECG) recording is a non-invasive method to assess fetal well-being during both pregnancy and delivery. However, AECG recording is contaminated by a series of physiological interferences which make difficult the extraction of morphological and temporal parameters of fetal ECG from the raw signals. In this work, it is proposed a combined method to extract the fetal ECG from AECG recording by removing the interferences on a cascade structure using a priori information about the signals nature. In this work, a total of 54 multichannel AECG recordings taken from 21 to 40 weeks of gestation were enrolled. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional independent component analysis, and provides fetal heart rate detection in 80% of the cases. In addition it also permits to obtain fetal ECG morphology from AECG recordings.