Extracting fetal heart rate from abdominal ECGs based on fast multivariate empirical mode decomposition

Abdominal electrocardiogram is an important means to obtain fetal health condition during high-risk pregnancy. In this paper, a novel method for extracting fetal heart rate from multi-channel mother abdomen electrocardiograms is proposed using fast multivariate empirical mode decomposition technique (FMEMD). Firstly, FMEMD decomposes the multichannel ECG signals into a set of modes. Two significant channels are selected according to the standard deviation of the fifth layer. Then the continuous wavelet transform technique (CWT) is applied to these two channels to denoise. The baseline is removed by zero-crossing rate. Following, the interference of the mother QRS complexes and non-overlapped fetal R-peaks can be eliminated and detected by CWT coefficient. The overlapped fetal R-peaks are obtained by combining the dynamic pattern matching program and creative algorithm. The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 99.9% on the existing data set, and the calculating time is only 1/6.39 of the MEMD-based method.