Efficient Fetal Heart Rate extraction using Undecimated Wavelet Transform

Fetal Heart Rate (FHR) is a very important information to monitor fetal health state. It contains potentially precise informations that could assist clinicians to making more appropriate decisions. In this paper a novel method is presented to estimate the FHR of the fetus cardiac activity using the composite abdominal electrocardiogram (ECG) recording which contains both the mother´s signals and the Fetal ECG signal. The method is based on the translation-invariant property of the Undecimated Wavelet Transform (UWT); No accessory preprocessing step for noise filtering is required. Besides, the method is advantageous since it is based only on the analysis of one abdominal signal, in contrast to other proposed methods which need a large number of abdominal ECG recordings.