The Novel Method for the Fetal Electrocardiogram Extraction from the Abdominal Signal

In this paper, we have proposed a new method to extract the fetal ECG from a pregnant woman´s abdominal signal using least square acceleration (LSA) filter and adaptive impulse correlation (AIC) filter. To evaluate the performance, the proposed method and other fetal ECG extraction techniques were processed using the synthetic and real ECG data and then the results were compared. According to comparative results, the proposed method is powerful and successful for extracting the fetal ECG. It was able to separate perfectly even though the fetal beats overlap with the QRS wave of the maternal beats and to extract fetal ECG using any single-channel abdominal signal measured from pregnant woman´s abdominal surface. Also, it could be implemented easily by fast computation time and simple structure. It is sure that our method could be useful for portable fetal monitoring system.