A Single Channel Phonocardiograph Processing Using EMD, SVD, and EFICA

Abstract

In this paper a novel approach using a trio of EMD, SVD and efficient version of FICA for extracting the fetal heart sound signals from the recorded single channel abdominal phonocardiogram (PCG) is presented. Phonocardiography is a low-cost, passive, non-invasive way of recording heart sounds and murmurs. Phonocardiography consists of recording acoustic signal on the maternal abdominal surface, and hence the recordings are heavily loaded by noise. Because of this the determination of the fetal heart rate (FHR) raises serious signal processing issues. We here propose a scheme of Blind Source Separation (BSS) technique for the fetal PCG extraction from the single channel recorded noisy abdominal phonographs. This presented method is the combination of the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), Singular Value decomposition (SVD) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA).