An Integrated Approach for Fetal Heart Rate Estimation from Abdominal Electrocardiogram Signal

Abstract

This paper introduces an integrated approach to estimate the fetal heart rate from the abdominal Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) can decompose the fetal ECG signal into a set of intrinsic mode functions, which can be used as the indicator of the occurrence for the fetal heartbeats. The decomposition basis functions are directly derived from the fetal signal under test, which make the detection process robust and adaptive. Multiple signal classification (MUSIC) is a high resolution algorithm for frequency estimation, which can be applied to the fetal heartbeats indicator sequence output from the preceding EMD, estimating the fetal heart rate in frequency domain without the heartbeat wave detection. Compared with the popular Independent component analysis (ICA) method, the proposed method has shown improved robustness and fidelity in estimation of the fetal heart rate during testing with real fetal ECG database from DaISy and PhysioNet.