Experimental evaluations of sequential adaptive processing for fetal electrocardiograms (ECGs)

Previously published results demonstrated that a sequential combination of adaptive linear prediction (LPC), adaptive noise cancellation (ANC), and IIR comb filtering (CF) can effectively remove maternal interference from noninvasive fetal ECGs. This paper presents experimental results to show how LPC-ANC sequential processing can extract fetal signals from noninvasive abdominal measurements. Experimental results demonstrate how various combinations of time-domain and transform-domain adaptive filters can effectively extract the fetal component from noninvasive abdominal fetal ECG´s. Experimental results also illustrate that sequential processing followed by single stage comb filtering and newly proposed adaptive comb filtering is an effective form of sequential processing.