Proceedings (Dec 2018)

Extraction of Fetal Heart Rate from Maternal ECG—Non Invasive Approach for Continuous Monitoring during Labor

  • Tashreque Mohammed Haq,
  • Safkat Arefin,
  • Shamiur Rahman,
  • Tanzilur Rahman

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/proceedings2131009
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2, no. 13
p. 1009

Abstract

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Here, we propose a signal processing based approach for the extraction of the fetal heart rate (FHR) from Maternal Abdominal ECG (MAECG) in a non-invasive way. Datasets from a Physionet database has been used in this study for evaluating the performance of the proposed model that performs three major tasks; preprocessing of the MAECG signal, separation of Fetal QRS complexes from that of maternal and estimation of Fetal R peak positions. The MAECG signal is first preprocessed with improved multistep filtering techniques to detect the Maternal QRS (MQRS) complexes, which are dominant in the MAECG. A reference template is then reconstructed based on MQRS locations and removed from the preprocessed signal resulting in the raw FECG. This extracted FECG is further corrected and enhanced before obtaining the Fetal R peaks. The detection of FQRS and calculation of FHR has been compared against the reference Fetal Scalp ECG. Results indicate that the approach achieved good accuracy.

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