Application of projective filtering to fetal electrocardiography

An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a medical test that detects cardiac abnormalities by measuring the electrical activity generated by the heart as it contracts. The analysis of ECG signal has always been an intriguing topic in the field of signal processing. This has been mainly due to the presence of noises in the signal which distorted the signal´s morphology. While analyzing the fetal ECG the noises distort the morphology of the signal much more severely and this is mainly due to the fact that the fetal ECG is much weaker than the adult ECG. Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography is a source of precise information on fetal heart activity. The work proposes an algorithm for fetal electrocardiogram extraction and enhancement from single channel maternal abdominal signal. The proposed method uses projective filtering for fetal ECG extraction and normalized matched filtering for fetal ECG enhancement.