Extracting MQRS and FQRS from non-invasive abdominal ECG

Abstract

Accurate extraction of the fetal QRS (FQRS) complex from the maternal abdominal ECG has become a very important clinical procedure to evaluate the well-being of the fetus. Fetal heart rate (FHR) obtained from the FQRS indicates fetal hypoxia, fetal distress and other fetal related problems. In this paper, first, the signal is pre-processed to remove baseline wandering and power line interference. In the following step, we proposed a technique to extract maternal QRS (MQRS) and FQRS from the various Physionet abdominal ECG (aECG) databases. The computed maternal and fetal QRS templates were optimized and fine-tuned for each of the physionet non-invasive aECG databases. The proposed system correctly evaluated and estimated the FECG signal for most records for the physionet abdominal and direct fetal ECG database (adfecgdb) with the fetal QRS annotations. Using auto and cross correlation techniques the MQRS and FQRS were estimated while the FHR was also correctly computed for most records. Using Matlab, the simulations for MQRS, FQRS and FHR are shown.