Abstract
Non-invasive foetal electrocardiography (fECG) continues to be an open topic for research. The development of standard algorithms for the extraction of the fECG from the maternal electrophysiological interference is limited by the lack of publicly available reference datasets that could be used to benchmark different algorithms while providing a ground truth for foetal heart activity when an invasive scalp lead is unavailable. In this work, we present the Non-Invasive Multimodal Foetal ECG-Doppler Dataset for Antenatal Cardiology Research (NInFEA), the first open-access multimodal early-pregnancy dataset in the field that features simultaneous non-invasive electrophysiological recordings and foetal pulsed-wave Doppler (PWD). The dataset is mainly conceived for researchers working on fECG signal processing algorithms. The dataset includes 60 entries from 39 pregnant women, between the 21st and 27th week of gestation. Each dataset entry comprises 27 electrophysiological channels (2048 Hz, 22 bits), a maternal respiration signal, synchronised foetal trans-abdominal PWD and clinical annotations provided by expert clinicians during signal acquisition. MATLAB snippets for data processing are also provided.
Highlights
Background & SummaryThe clinical assessment of the foetal heart activity is an important step for diagnosis[1,2], and monitoring purposes[3,4]
According to the American Heart Association, non-invasive foetal ECG (fECG) has been available for decades, its clinical introduction has been delayed for several reasons[8], including the complex setup, a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the absence of public datasets enabling comparative evaluation of different techniques for the extraction of the fECG signal from non-invasive recordings, and featuring multiple simultaneous modalities for researchers
We demonstrate some important parameters that could help a researcher in the selection and use of our data for the development and assessment of novel algorithms for fECG extraction and processing, pulsed-wave Doppler (PWD) analysis and foetal cardiac physiology studies to assess the quality of the presented dataset
Summary
The clinical assessment of the foetal heart activity is an important step for diagnosis[1,2], and monitoring purposes[3,4]. Similar reservations hold for the Abdominal and Direct Foetal Electrocardiogram Database (ADFECGDB), which contains 4-lead (homogeneous placement) recordings from five women in labour, between the 38th and 41st weeks of gestation[22] The advantage of this dataset is the presence of a direct (invasive) reference fECG, which can be used as a gold standard, along with the length of the traces, which are five minutes long. A standard fECG dataset should have an adequate number of leads (preferably sixteen or more26), homogeneous placement, appropriate signal quality and quantisation level (sixteen or more effective number of bits), high sampling frequency (1 kHz or higher), and alternative simultaneous modalities for cross-validation and benchmarking[26] for algorithm development and electrophysiological research These requirements mainly apply to datasets used for the aforementioned research needs, and not necessarily to the recording of non-invasive fECG for clinical use. The dataset is freely available on Physionet[35]
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