Noninvasive Fetal Electrocardiogram Extraction

Access to reliable and easily extractable fetal electrocardiogram recordings would help the physician better determine fetal heart conditions and diagnose fetal cardiac defects early in the pregnancy. This book presents a novel method for automatically extracting beat-to-beat fetal electrocardiogram from maternal surface electrodes down to gestation week twenty and possibly earlier. Extraction is based on a two-stage blind adaptive filtering algorithm, the first stage using frequency-domain electrocardiogram features and the second considering time-domain features. Extraction has succeeded in all available real data sets from patients. The combined filter also allowed the identification of diagnostically important PR, QT, QS and RR durations. This book should be useful to researchers, engineers, and physicians who may be interested in the noninvasive extraction and the early diagnosis of fetal electrocardiogram.