Processing of Abdominal Fetal Electrocardiogram—A Review

Abstract

The fetal heart signal is useful in the management of the birth process as well as in assessing fetal development including congenital defects. The fetal electrocardiogram can be recorded noninvasively by placing the electrodes on the mother's abdomen. The abdominal fetal signal consists of a weak fetal signal, a relatively strong maternal heart signal and considerable noise contributed by electrical potential from the maternal abdominal muscles and random electrical noise. Several techniques have been developed to improve the quality of fetal signals. These techniques include coherent time averaging, correlation techniques, spatial filtering techniques, estimation techniques, adaptive filtering techniques and so on. In this paper various techniques proposed for improving the signal-to-noise ratio of abdominal fetal electrocardiogram are studied and their performances are compared.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S Selvan

S Selvan, obtained his BE in Electronics and Communication Engineering, ME in Communication Systems both from University of Madras and has submitted PhD thesis to Madurai Kamaraj University. He has more than 21 years of teaching experience in reputed Engineering Colleges in Tamilnadu. Currently he is working as the Professor and Head in the Department of Information Technology at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore. His areas of interest include neural networks, adaptive signal processing, adaptive array processing and communication networks. He has 27 publications in International and National Conferences and Journals. He is a senior member of IEEE and Fellow of IE (I) and IETE.

R Srinivasan

Rengaramanujam Srinivasan, obtained his BE in Electrical & Electronics Engineering in 1962 (University of Madras), ME Power Electrical in 1964 (IISc) and PhD in Electrical in 1970 (IIT Kharagpur). He joined Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai in 1964 as Associate Lecturer and retired as the Principal of that College in 1998. Currently he is working as the Professor and Head in the Department of Computer Applications at Crescent College of Engineering, Chennai. He has more than 30 publications in National and International Journals. He is presently working in neural networks. The other areas of his interest are energy audit & energy conservation.