A Novel Methodology for Fetal Heart Rate Extraction from the Abdominal Electrocardiogram

This paper proposes an automated methodology for extracting fetal heart rate from single cutaneous potential abdominal signal. The proposed method calculates fetal heart rate in three steps. First, two-tier method based on singular value decomposition and polynomial classifiers is applied to the abdominal signal to separate the fetal ECG and the maternal ECG. Second, the fetal R-peaks are detected from the separated fetal ECG signal. Third, false R-peaks are eliminated and fetal heart rate is calculated. The proposed method is validated on both synthetic and real abdominal ECG and yielded a heart rate accuracy of 96%. The proposed method is advantageous since it requires only one lead in contrast to other methods which require multiple leads.