Fetal electrocardiogram R-peak detection using robust tensor decomposition and extended Kalman filtering

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for R-peak detection in noninvasive fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) signals which are acquired from multiple electrodes on mother´s abdomen. The proposed method is performed in two steps: first, we employ a robust tensor decomposition-based method for fetal ECG extraction, assuming different heart rates for mother and fetal ECG; then a method based on extended Kalman filter (EKF) in which the ECG beat is modeled by 3 state equations (P, QRS and T), is used for fetal R-peak detection. The results show that the proposed method is efficiently able to estimate the location of R-peaks of fetal ECG signals. The obtained average scores of event 4 and 5 on the set B of “Physionet Challenge 2013” data are 1326.21 and 45.06, respectively, which are better than the average score for “sample submission physionet2013.m” (available at PhysioNet) on set B which were 3258.56 and 102.75.