Fetal electrocardiogram extraction from maternal abdominal signals

An integrated approach for fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) extraction based on the joint application of wavelet transform (WT) and independent component analysis (ICA) is proposed. This research is aimed at development of computer based electrocardiography systems of high resolution, which require the advanced methods for early noninvasive diagnostics of fetal status. The results of this study demonstrate that ICA can effectively distinguish the fetal independent components, but requires the use of additional methods for noise removing from these components. Elimination of noise is achieved by WT applying. Joint application of ICA and WT allowed us to extract with slight distortions of useful signal the simulated fetal ECG from the artificial signal containing maternal ECG and noise.