Early Detection of Congenital Heart Defects from Fetal Abdominal Electrocardiograph Signals using Adaptive Filtering

Abstract

Fetal heart abnormalities are the most common congenital anomalies and it causes the infant to have defects by birth. The fetal cardiac structure is small and due to fast movements the early diagnosis was too difficult. In this paper the abnormalities were determined from fetal abdominal ECG. Initially pre processing was done to smoothen the waveform and for noise detection. It works based adaptive filtering algorithm. One input for this filter is coefficient of abdominal ECG. The correlations between the coefficients were computed using stationary wavelet algorithm. Finally a peak detection algorithm was used to find the QRS peak position.