A Novel Technique for the Extraction of Fetal ECG Using Polynomial Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel technique for extracting fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) from a thoracic ECG recording and an abdominal ECG recording of a pregnant woman. The polynomial networks technique is used to nonlinearly map the thoracic ECG signal to the abdominal ECG signal. The FECG is then extracted by subtracting the mapped thoracic ECG from the abdominal ECG signal. Visual test results obtained from real ECG signals show that the proposed algorithm is capable of reliably extracting the FECG from two leads only. The visual quality of the FECG extracted by the proposed technique is found to meet or exceed that of published results using other techniques such as the independent component analysis.