Reconstruction of Fetal Cardiac Vectors From Multichannel fMCG Data Using Recursively Applied and Projected Multiple Signal Classification

Tracking Fetal Movement Through Source Localization From Multisensor Magnetocardiographic Recordings

Due to its high spatial and temporal resolution, fetal magnetocardiography (fMCG) measurements have been used for fetal movement (FM) detection in several studies, which considered the changes in the amplitude and/or morphology of measured fMCG signals. Using source localization for fMCG measurements, we propose a novel method to fit a magnetic dipole moment to fetal heart signals and investigate the positional changes of magnetic dipole in order to detect FMs. We first split each fMCG recording into 6-s time windows. Then, the magnetic dipole location and orientation for each time window are estimated using our inverse solution model. Finally, the distance between magnetic dipole positions in adjacent time windows is computed. Also, we calculate the dot products of the normalized magnetic dipoles to monitor the orientational changes. We analyzed 28 fMCG measurements from 23 subjects to investigate accuracy of the dipole fitting results. For each dipole fit, our model described the measured data with a goodness-of-fit value over 97% and with a fitting error of less than 2%. We observed that magnetic dipole positions significantly moved for some time windows. The time points at which the significant movement was observed were correlated with the heart rate acceleration as well. In addition to identifying the time points of the movement, our method is capable of observing rotational movement checking orientation of the dipoles.

Genetic algorithms for dipole location of fetal magnetocardiography

In this paper, we explore the use of Maximum Likelihood (ML) method with Genetic Algorithms (GA) as global optimization procedure for source reconstruction in fetal magnetocardiography (fMCG) data. A multiple equivalent current dipole (ECD) model was used for sources active in different time samples. Inverse solutions across time were obtained for a single-dipole approximation to estimate the trajectory of the dipole position. We compared the GA and SIMPLEX methods in a simulation environment under noise conditions. Methods are applied on a real fMCG data. Results show robust estimators of the cardiac sources when GA is used as optimization technique.

Cardiac vectors in the healthy human fetus: developmental changes assessed by magnetocardiography and realistic approximations of the volume conductor

This study sought to characterize the developmental changes of three measures used to describe the morphology of the fetal cardiac vector: QRS peak-amplitude, QRS duration and QRS time-amplitude integral. To achieve this objective, we rely on a recently developed methodology for fetal cardiac vector estimation, using multichannel fetal magnetocardiographic (fMCG) recordings and realistic approximations of the volume conductors obtained from free-hand ultrasound imaging. fMCG recordings and 3D ultrasound images were obtained from 23 healthy, uncomplicated pregnancies for a total of 77 recordings performed at gestational ages between 22 and 37 weeks. We report the developmental changes of the cardiac vector parameters with respect to gestational age and estimated fetal weight, as well as their dependence on the estimated ventricular mass derived from cardiac dimensions measured with M-mode ultrasound. The normative values can be used along with the cardiac time intervals reported by previous fMCG studies to assist future clinical studies investigating conditions that affect fetal cardiac function.

The effect of volume conductor modeling on the estimation of cardiac vectors in fetal magnetocardiography

Previous studies based on fetal magnetocardiographic (fMCG) recordings used simplified volume conductor models to estimate the fetal cardiac vector as an unequivocal measure of the cardiac source strength. However, the effect of simplified volume conductor modeling on the accuracy of the fMCG inverse solution remains largely unknown. Aiming to determine the sensitivity of the source estimators to the details of the volume conductor model, we performed simulations using fetal-maternal anatomical information from ultrasound images obtained in 20 pregnant women in various stages of pregnancy. The magnetic field produced by a cardiac source model was computed using the boundary-element method for a piecewise homogeneous volume conductor with three nested compartments (fetal body, amniotic fluid and maternal abdomen) of different electrical conductivities. For late gestation, we also considered the case of a fourth highly insulating layer of vernix caseosa covering the fetus. The errors introduced for simplified volume conductors were assessed by comparing the reconstruction results obtained with realistic versus spherically symmetric models. Our study demonstrates the significant effect of simplified volume conductor modeling, resulting mainly in an underestimation of the cardiac vector magnitude and low goodness-of-fit. These findings are confirmed by the analysis of real fMCG data recorded in mid-gestation.