Fetal electrocardiogram extraction based on non-stationary ICA and wavelet denoising

Fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) monitoring is a technique for obtaining important information about the condition of the fetus during pregnancy and labour by measuring electrical signals generated by the fetal heart as measured from multi-channel potential recordings on the mother body surface. It is shown in this paper that the fetal ECG can be reconstructed by means of higher order statistical tools exploiting ECG nonstationarity associated with post-denoising with wavelets. The method is illustrated on real fetal ECG data.