The Maternal Abdominal ECG as Input to MICA in the Fetal ECG Extraction Problem

This letter presents a successful system for recovering the fetal electrocardiogram using multidimensional ICA (MICA). MICA requires as many observations as sources. To increase the number of observations, MICA is often applied to data sets that include measurements taken at the mother´s thoracic region. However, experiments suggest that the propagation from the maternal heart to the mother´s abdomen is not a simple delay, and that approach may fail. Alternatively, our method first estimates the maternal ECG directly from the mother´s abdomen. Then, inputs this estimated ECG to MICA. Experiments show superior performance as compared with the traditional approach.