The use of thoracic-abdominal transfer function in extracting fetal electrocardiogram

The technique that uses the thoracic abdominal transfer function for fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) extraction is proposed and tested. Signals obtained by means of surface electrodes during non-invasive FECG monitoring are contaminated by maternal electrocardiogram (MECG). The proposed method calculates the transfer function between thoracic and abdominal MECG. Upon acquiring this transfer function, the abdominal MECG can be estimated using simultaneously recorded thoracic MECG for cancellation. Both simulated and real signals were used to evaluate the performance of this method. It is concluded that this method provides good to excellent results depend on the quality of incoming signals