Extracting fetal ECG from a single maternal abdominal record

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel two-tier technique for extracting fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) from a single abdominal record. The proposed method in its first tier extracts an estimate of the maternal ECG by processing the abdominal signal through a savitzky-golay smoothing filter. The estimated maternal ECG is then nonlinearly aligned with the abdominal signal using polynomial networks to extract the fetal ECG signal results on synthetic and real abdominal ECG data show that the proposed method can extract fetal ECG with signal quality comparable or better than that extracted by multichannel based methods.