Abstract
Monitoring the fetal heart rate (FHR) throughout pregnancy empowers the clinician to diagnose fetal well being, characterize fetal development and detect abnormality (Freeman et al. 2003). A non-invasive and low cost system would enable monitoring of normal pregnancies and promote large population studies of fetal physiological development (Freeman et al. 2003). FHR monitoring is an ongoing observation of human fetal physiology. The expected outcome of this early detection is a reduced risk of fetal morbidity and mortality (Philip et al. 2002). Currently, Doppler ultrasound has been extensively used for FHR detection and obstetric purposes (Hershkovitz et al. 2002), where the standard pre-delivery test of fetal health is the fetal non-stress test (NST). These tests are routinely performed at the hospital where continuous-wave instruments are more popular than pulsed ones. The use of Doppler ultrasound in the first trimester is generally not recommended as a routine (Hershkovitz et al. 2002) as it may increases the occurrence of intrauterine growth restriction. Besides that, the FHR measurements using Doppler ultrasound are not always reliable (Karlsson et al. 2000) due to the complexity of the Doppler signal and the effects of fetal and maternal breathing. An alternative to ultrasound is using the fetal electrocardiogram (FECG). In direct (invasive) fetal electrocardiogram (FECG), the FHR could be obtained by attaching scalp electrode to the fetal scalp after the rupture of the membrane (Khandpur 2004). During invasive FECG recording the uterus may be perforated leading to its infection, besides possible scalp injuries to the fetus (Khandpur 2004). The other approach is non-invasive FECG but FECG signals have a low (signal to noise ratio) SNR due to the interference from noise, maternal electrocardiogram (MECG) and electromyogram (EMG). The application of non-invasive FECG requires multiple leads and advanced digital signal processing techniques (Najafabadi et al. 2006). It is worth mentioning that commercial devices operating on non-invasive FECG are not available at this moment. Optical techniques has received a considerable attention in biomedical diagnostic and monitoring of biological tissues such as brain imaging, breast imaging and for fetal heart rate detection and oxygen saturation measurement due to its theoretical advantages in
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