Introduction: Fetal magnetocardiography (fMCG) is a promising new technique for assessing fetal rhythm; however, no prior studies have utilized fMCG to evaluate human fetal electromechanical physiology. Pre-ejection period (PEP) is an important measure of the electromechanical activation of the heart, and is altered by disease states and arrhythmias. Materials and Methods: A novel technique was used to assess fetal PEP and its relationship to other fetal systolic time intervals, RR interval, and gestational age (GA). 25 normal human fetuses between 19 and 38 weeks’ gestation were studied using simultaneous pulsed Doppler ultrasound and fMCG. Correlations among PEP, ejection time, QRS width and RR interval were assessed using linear regression. Results: Across all subjects, PEP was found to correlate with GA (R = 0.57, p < 0.0001), QRS width (R = 0.35, p = 0.026), and RR interval (R = 0.37, p = 0.018). In individual sessions, PEP negatively correlated beat-to-beat with the preceding RR interval. Conclusion: PEP exhibits developmental trends that provide a better understanding of the normal development of the human fetal heart.
We investigated the utility of ICA for evaluation of fetal rhythm in five uncomplicated twin pregnancies and in five twin pregnancies complicated by fetal arrhythmia. Using objective and subjective criteria, we sought to determine how the signal-to-noise ratio, signal fidelity and interference rejection are affected when synthesizing the fetal signal using all the signal-containing ICA components (rank-p ICA) versus using the single dominant component (rank-1 ICA). The signal of each fetus was most commonly distributed over 1 or 2 ICA components, as previously observed in studies of singleton pregnancies; however, in 8 of 26 (31%) cases the signal of each fetus was distributed over 3, 4 or even 5 ICA components. Rank-1 ICA provided the highest SNR and interference rejection, but at the cost of reduced signal fidelity. Our results corroborate that in twin pregnancies, including twin pregnancies complicated by fetal arrhythmia, rank-1 ICA is very effective in isolating the QRS complexes of each fetus; however, it has some limitations when used for fetal rhythm evaluation due to signal distortion. Occasionally, rank-1 ICA completely separates the P-wave and the T-wave from the QRS complex, thus requiring the mixing of several ICA components to achieve acceptable signal fidelity.
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