Reconstruction of fetal vector electrocardiogram from maternal abdominal signals under fetus body rotations

Abstract

Fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) and its vector form (fVECG) could provide significant clinical information concerning physiological conditions of a fetus. So far various independent component analysis (ICA)-based methods for extracting fECG from maternal abdominal signals have been proposed. Because full extraction of component waves such as P, Q, R, S, and T, is difficult to be realized under noisy and nonstationary situations, the fVECG is further hard to be reconstructed, where different projections of the fetal heart vector are required. In order to reconstruct fVECG, we proposed a novel method for synthesizing different projections of the heart vector, making good use of the fetus movement. This method consists of ICA, estimation of rotation angles of fetus, and synthesis of projections of the heart vector. Through applications to the synthetic and actual data, our method is shown to precisely estimate rotation angle of the fetus and to successfully reconstruct the fVECG.