Extraction of Fetal ECG Signal via Adaptive Noise Cancellation Approach

The non-invasive fetal Electrocardiogram (FECG) can provide reliable information about the fetus´state. The original FECG signal is nevertheless very complex and severely contaminated by external disturbances or noises. It is very hard, even not impossible, to reliably extract the FECG from the abdominal signal using traditional techniques. In this work the recursive least squares (RLS) based adaptive noise canceling (ANC) approach is applied to eliminate the maternal ECG (MECG) and hence to extract the FECG. The experimental results have demonstrated that the developed ANC approach can speed up convergence of the normalized least mean squares (NLMS) algorithm and is able to track non-stationary FECG signal in an adaptive manner.