Fetal ECG extraction from abdominal composite recordings - A preliminary study

Extracting fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) from the abdominal composite signals acquired from the maternal abdomen remains an unsolved problem in biomedical signal processing. The aim of the present study is to recover the fetal ECG directly from the composite signals without the need of recording the maternal ECG reference signal. Thus, a technique that combines independent component Analysis (ICA) and adaptive filtering and that takes into account the propagation delays of the different electrical activities recorded by multiple electrodes placed at different abdominal locations is described. The presented technique is tested on real multichannel recordings. The results show that fetal ECG can be successfully recovered from the composite abdominal signals without the need of recording any reference signal.