Detection and Processing Techniques of FECG Signal for Fetal Monitoring

Abstract

Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) signal contains potentially precise information that could assist clinicians in making more appropriate and timely decisions during labor. The ultimate reason for the interest in FECG signal analysis is in clinical diagnosis and biomedical applications. The extraction and detection of the FECG signal from composite abdominal signals with powerful and advance methodologies are becoming very important requirements in fetal monitoring. The purpose of this review paper is to illustrate the various methodologies and developed algorithms on FECG signal detection and analysis to provide efficient and effective ways of understanding the FECG signal and its nature for fetal monitoring. A comparative study has been carried out to show the performance and accuracy of various methods of FECG signal analysis for fetal monitoring. Finally, this paper further focused some of the hardware implementations using electrical signals for monitoring the fetal heart rate. This paper opens up a passage for researchers, physicians, and end users to advocate an excellent understanding of FECG signal and its analysis procedures for fetal heart rate monitoring system.

Extraction for fetal ECG using single channel blind source separation algorithm based on multi-algorithm fusion

“…The commonly used method to detect FECG is using abdominal signal. However, the obtained FECG is easy to be affected by maternal ECG (MECG) and noise and pure FECG cannot be acquired [1] [2].…”

Hardware Prototyping of Neural Network based Fetal Electrocardiogram Extraction

“…The physician or clinician could identify problems in FHR activity during the pregnancy if they could obtain a reliable reading of the FECG. The FECG is a biomedical signal that can be obtained non-invasively from the abdomen of a pregnant woman by employing a set of electrodes [1]. The prominent attributes of the FECG signal, such as presence of signal, magnitude or frequency, wave shape and dynamic behavior are useful for specifying the fetal lifespan, fetal maturity and being of fetal distress or inborn heart disease.…”

“…Thus, the demand for the powerful and advanced methodologies for extraction of FECG signals from the AECG signal is strongly rising in biomedical engineering. However, the FECG signal is susceptible to noise, thus, an analysis of efficient processing is necessary to remove the noise in the AECG signals [1]. The recording of AECG is associated with the number of difficulties and complication steps.…”

ICA-Based Fetal Monitoring

“…There exists, by contrast, an increasing interest in non-invasive fECG recording techniques (Hasan et al, 2009). These techniques should enable monitoring in stages of pregnancy earlier than labor, i.e.…”

“…As there is a considerable overlap between the frequency bands of the mECG and the fECG (Abboud & Sadeh, 1989), the mECG cannot be suppressed by a simple linear filter. A variety of different approaches have been proposed to extract the fECG from abdominal recordings (Hasan et al, 2009). In this Chapter, we describe and illustrate the specific application of ICA to this exciting problem.…”