Fetal movement quantification by fetal vectorcardiography: A preliminary study

Abstract

Fetal movement is a valuable source of information to monitor the neurological development of the fetus and assess fetal health. Currently, fetal movement can be assessed by the mother or detected by analysis of ultrasound images. Long-term monitoring of movement is complicated with both these methods as maternal self-assessment has a relatively poor sensitivity and specificity and automatic analysis of ultrasound images is not available. Moreover, ultrasound transducers transmit energy into the body, potentially endangering fetal health. In this paper, an alternative method for fetal movement monitoring is presented. This method operates by estimating and analyzing the fetal vectorcardiogram (VCG) from non-invasive recordings on the maternal abdomen. The determined fetal movement is compared with that assessed from a simultaneously performed ultrasound recording; the results of the presented method are consistent with the ultrasound images. In addition, the presented method enables quantification of the rotation angles by means of analysis of the rotation matrix between consecutive fetal VCGs, providing a tool for long-term monitoring of fetal movement with increased specificity.

A systematic scoping review to identify the design and assess the performance of devices for antenatal continuous fetal monitoring

“…Ten of the 43 studies were from the UK [25][26][27]35,[37][38][39]49,50,55], 22 from other European countries [24,[28][29][30][31][32][33]36,40,[42][43][44]48,[51][52][53][54]56,57,61,64,65], five from Japan [41,59,60,62,63], one from India [45], one from Australia [66], three from the United States of America (USA) [46,47,58], and one study from both the Netherlands and USA [34]. The included studies were heterogeneous, they had a median sample size of 34.5 participants (range 1-657) and a median number of recordings of 63 (range 1-657).…”

Non-Invasive Fetal Monitoring: A Maternal Surface ECG Electrode Placement-Based Novel Approach for Optimization of Adaptive Filter Control Parameters Using the LMS and RLS Algorithms

“…This way, it would be possible to achieve the information about the fetal position even without utilization of the ultrasound; see [108,109,110]. …”

Influence of Electrode Placement on Signal Quality for Ambulatory Pregnancy Monitoring

“…A matrix operation similar to the inverse Dower matrix in (2) can be used to extract the fVCG from the abdominal electrodes. To this end, the matrix coefficients are adjusted based on the spatial locations of the electrodes with respect to the fetal heart, as discussed in [32]. For the measurement setup as described in [7], the adjusted matrix to obtain the fVCG ${\overrightarrow{p}}^f$ is defined as $\begin{array}{c}\left[\begin{array}{c}{p}_x^f\\ p_y^f\\ p_z^f\end{array}\right]={\left[\begin{array}{ccc}-\mathrm{normal1.074}& -\mathrm{normal1.200}& \mathrm{normal1.044}\\ -\mathrm{normal0.715}& -\mathrm{normal0.615}& \mathrm{normal1.287}\\ -\mathrm{normal0.650}& \mathrm{normal0.604}& \mathrm{normal1.280}\\ -\mathrm{normal1.095}& \mathrm{normal1.196}& \mathrm{normal1.040}\\ -\mathrm{normal1.309}& \mathrm{normal1.200}& -\mathrm{normal0.528}\\ -\mathrm{normal0.507}& \mathrm{normal0.615}& -\mathrm{normal1.038}\\ -\mathrm{normal0.578}& -\mathrm{normal0.606}& -\mathrm{normal1.003}\\ -\mathrm{normal1.266}& -\mathrm{normal1.198}& -\mathrm{normal0.529}\end{array}\right]}^T\left[\begin{array}{c}{L}_{\mathrm{normal1}}\\ L_{\mathrm{normal2}}\\ L_{\mathrm{normal3}}\\ L_{\mathrm{normal4}}\\ L_{\mathrm{normal5}}\\ L_{\mathrm{normal6}}\\ L_{\mathrm{normal7}}\\ L_{\mathrm{normal8}}\end{array}\right],\end{array}$ where L 1 – L 8 are leads 1–8 as described in [7].…”