Abstract
Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography (ECG) is based on the acquisition of signals from abdominal surface electrodes. The composite abdominal signal consists of the maternal electrocardiogram along with the fetal electrocardiogram and other electrical interferences. These recordings allow for the acquisition of valuable and reliable information that helps ensure fetal well-being during pregnancy. This paper introduces a procedure for fetal heart rate extraction from a single-channel abdominal ECG signal. The procedure is composed of three main stages: a method based on wavelet for signal denoising, a new clustering-based methodology for detecting fetal QRS complexes, and a final stage to correct false positives and false negatives. The novelty of the procedure thus relies on using clustering techniques to classify singularities from the abdominal ECG into three types: maternal QRS complexes, fetal QRS complexes, and noise. The amplitude and time distance of all the local maxima followed by a local minimum were selected as features for the clustering classification. A wide set of real abdominal ECG recordings from two different databases, providing a large range of different characteristics, was used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method. The accuracy achieved shows that the proposed technique exhibits a competitve performance when compared to other recent works in the literature and a better performance over threshold-based techniques.
Highlights
The early detection of defects in the fetal heart is of paramount importance for the management of pregnancy and childbirth timing
For each level from i = 1 to M, the appropriate threshold limit and rule [14] are applied to the detail coefficientsThe wavelet reconstruction based on the zeroing approximations of level L, the modified details of levels 1 to M, and the original details of levels M + 1 to L are computed to obtain the baseline wandering (BW)-corrected and denoised abdominal electrocardiogram (AECG) signal
Time thresholds are related to extremely low fetal heart rate (FHR), while the amplitude threshold is established within a range related to the maximum of MQRS complexes after BW and noise suppression
Summary
The early detection of defects in the fetal heart is of paramount importance for the management of pregnancy and childbirth timing. Electrocardiogram (FECG) monitoring methods [5, 6] measure the abdominal electrocardiogram (AECG) through skin electrodes on the expecting mother’s abdomen This signal is composed of the FECG along with the maternal electrocardiogram (MECG). Techniques based on the elimination or separation of MECGs make FHR extraction possible, the results are not as good for obtaining more exhaustive information referring to the P waves and QRS complexes of the FECG signal. In abdominal signals, the fetal R-peaks often overlap with the maternal R-peaks These facts make it difficult to develop a unique method that effectively detects the FHR from AECG signals. For FHR monitoring, the method uses only one abdominal electrode recording without separating the FECG from the AECG, so the fetal QRS complexes are directly extracted from the denoised AECG signal. Results and discussion are presented while the final section summarizes the conclusions of this work
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