Extraction of fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) by extended state Kalman filtering and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) based on single channel abdominal recording

Abstract

Fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) gives information about the health status of fetus and so, an early diagnosis of any cardiac defect before delivery increases the effectiveness of appropriate treatment. In this paper, authors investigate the use of adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) with extended Kalman filter for fetal ECG extraction from one ECG signal recorded at the abdominal areas of the mother’s skin. The abdominal ECG is considered to be composite as it contains both mother’s and fetus’ ECG signals. We use extended Kalman filter framework to estimate the maternal component from abdominal ECG. The maternal component in the abdominal ECG signal is a nonlinear transformed version of maternal ECG. ANFIS network has been used to identify this nonlinear relationship, and to align the estimated maternal ECG signal with the maternal component in the abdominal ECG signal. Thus, we extract the fetal ECG component by subtracting the aligned version of the estimated maternal ECG from the abdominal signal. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in extracting the fetal ECG component from abdominal signal at different noise levels. The proposed technique is also validated on the extraction of fetal ECG from both actual abdominal recordings and synthetic abdominal recording.