The Method and Algorithm for Detecting the Fetal ECG Signal in the Presence of Interference

Abstract

This article discusses the importance of timely and accurate detection of fetal distress during pregnancy to reduce the risk of adverse outcomes. One non-invasive method of fetal monitoring is through the use of fetal cardiodiagnostic systems, which record the fetal ECG signal. However, selecting a reliable fetal ECG signal can be challenging, as the signal may be weak and prone to interference. The article presents several existing methods for extracting useful fetal ECG signals from a mixture, including blind signal separation, adaptive filtering, synphase method, component method, spectral method, and bispectral processing. However, the limitations of these methods make it necessary to develop a new method that can consider time-frequency characteristics and phase-time parameters of the ECG signal simultaneously. The article proposes a new algorithm and method for extracting fetal ECG signals, which involves several steps, including registration of maternal ECG signals, synphase detection of fetal ECG signals and adaptive filtering. The proposed method was tested on a generated ECG signal and was found to be effective in extracting the fetal ECG signal from noisy and artifactcontaining signals. The method and algorithm for detecting the fetal ECG signal in the presence of obstacles is implemented in the MATLAB environment.