Reconstruction of fetal vector electrocardiogram from maternal abdominal signals under fetus body rotations.

Fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) and its vector form (fVECG) could provide significant clinical information concerning physiological conditions of a fetus. So far various independent component analysis (ICA)-based methods for extracting fECG from maternal abdominal signals have been proposed. Because full extraction of component waves such as P, Q, R, S, and T, is difficult to be realized under noisy and nonstationary situations, the fVECG is further hard to be reconstructed, where different projections of the fetal heart vector are required.

Robustness of the blind source separation with reference against uncertainties of the reference signals.

The fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) could provide clinical information concerning physiological conditions of the fetus. In order to extract fetal ECG, we proposed the novel algorithm, the blind source separation with reference (BSSR), which successfully extracts a complete waveform of QRS complex and avoids uncertainty in the order of the extracted signals. In the BSSR, the reference signal is supposed to be generated from the ultrasonic Doppler signal.