Compressive-sensing-based multidimensional Doppler signal analysis for fetal activity monitoring

Fetal activity monitoring is an important part of monitoring at-risk pregnancies and labor. Fetal activity parameters (FAP) consist of fetal heart rate (FHR), fetal movements (FM) rate, fetal tone, fetal breathing (FB) and movement. FAP monitoring is to date an open challenge for mainly two reasons. First, the estimation of FAP is highly time consuming and thus cannot be used routinely. Second, part of FAP such as FM estimation is sometimes subjective (mothers are asked to count the fetal movements) and inaccurate. For this purpose, we developed a 2MHz pulsed wave ultrasound Doppler system, consisting of 12 transducers with 5 adjustable gates. The Doppler signals were sampled at 1KHz. Several recent papers have shown the accuracy of our system. However, its counterpart is the huge number of signals necessary to estimate the FAP. Specifically, each millisecond, 60 Doppler samples are acquired. In order to reduce the volume of the acquired data and to accelerate the FAP estimation rate, we propose herein to investigate the interest of compressive sensing (CS) techniques to our application.