Extraction of Fetal ECG from Maternal Abdominal Record in the 3rd Trimester of Gestation using R-R Interval Windowing Technique

摘要

Thousands of unborn children around the globe die everyday in their mother's womb due to stillbirth. The major cause for stillbirth is the inability to non-invasively monitor the Fetal Heart Rate (FHR) continuously during pregnancy. This triggered the search for alternative Fetal monitoring techniques, namely non-invasive Fetal Electrocardiogram (FECG) monitoring. Hence, we propose a time domain analysis and Fetal R-R interval windowing approach for the non-invasive extraction of FECG from Maternal Abdominal Electrocardiogram (MAECG), which achieved an accuracy of about 96.39% when compared against the reference direct Fetal Scalp ECG, and is higher than other relevant methods discussed in this paper. This simulation is based on records from the public database - Abdominal and Direct Fetal ECG Database (ADFECGDB) from Physionet.