Maternal MCG Interference Cancellation Using Splined Independent Component Subtraction

Signal distortion is commonly observed when using independent component analysis (ICA) to remove maternal cardiac interference from the fetal magnetocardiogram. This can be seen even in the most conservative case where only the independent components dominated by maternal interference are subtracted from the raw signal, a procedure we refer to as independent component subtraction (ICS). Distortion occurs when the subspaces of the fetal and maternal signals have appreciable overlap. To overcome this problem, we employed splining to remove the fetal signal from the maternal source component. The maternal source components were downsampled and then interpolated to their original sampling rate using a cubic spline. A key aspect of the splining procedure is that the maternal QRS complexes are downsampled much less than the rest of the maternal signal so that they are not distorted, despite their higher bandwidth. The splined maternal source components were projected back onto the magnetic field measurement space and then subtracted from the raw signal. The method was evaluated using data from 24 subjects. We compared the results of conventional, i.e., unsplined, ICS with our method, splined ICS, using matched filtering as a reference. Correlation and subjective assessment of the P-wave and QRS complex were used to assess the performance. Using ICS, we found that the P-wave was adversely affected in 7 of 24 (29%) subjects, all having correlations less than 0.8. Splined ICS showed negligible distortion and improved the signal fidelity to some extent in all subjects. We also demonstrated that maternal T-wave interference could be problematic when the fetal and maternal heartbeats were synchronous. In these instances, splined ICS was more effective than matched filtering.