Blind source extraction using generalized autocorrelations

A Null Space-Based Blind Source Separation for Fetal Electrocardiogram Signals

This paper presents a new non-invasive deterministic algorithm of extracting the fetal Electrocardiogram (FECG) signal based on a new null space idempotent transformation matrix (NSITM). The mixture matrix is used to compute the ITM. Then, the fetal ECG (FECG) and maternal ECG (MECG) signals are extracted from the null space of the ITM. Next, MECG and FECG peaks detection, control logic, and adaptive comb filter are used to remove the unwanted MECG component from the raw FECG signal, thus extracting a clean FECG signal. The visual results from Daisy and Physionet real databases indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective in extracting the FECG signal, which can be compared with principal component analysis (PCA), fast independent component analysis (FastICA), and parallel linear predictor (PLP) filter algorithms. Results from Physionet synthesized ECG data show considerable improvement in extraction performances over other algorithms used in this work, considering different additive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) increasing from 0 dB to 12 dB, and considering different fetal-to-maternal SNR increasing from -30 dB to 0 dB. The FECG detection of the NSITM is evaluated using statistical measures and results show considerable improvement in the sensitivity (SE), the accuracy (ACC), and the positive predictive value (PPV), as compared with other algorithms. The study demonstrated that the NSITM is a feasible algorithm for FECG extraction.

Custom FPGA processing for real-time fetal ECG extraction and identification

Monitoring the fetal cardiac activity during pregnancy is of crucial importance for evaluating fetus health. However, there is a lack of automatic and reliable methods for Fetal ECG (FECG) monitoring that can perform this elaboration in real-time. In this paper, we present a hardware architecture, implemented on the Altera Stratix V FPGA, capable of separating the FECG from the maternal ECG and to correctly identify it. We evaluated our system using both synthetic and real tracks acquired from patients beyond the 20th pregnancy week. This work is part of a project aiming at developing a portable system for FECG continuous real-time monitoring. Its characteristics of reduced power consumption, real-time processing capability and reduced size make it suitable to be embedded in the overall system, that is the first proposed exploiting Blind Source Separation with this technology, to the best of our knowledge.

A Fetal Electrocardiogram Signal Extraction Algorithm Based on the Temporal Structure and the Non-Gaussianity

Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) extraction is an important issue in biomedical signal processing. In this paper, we develop an objective function for extraction of FECG. The objective function is based on the non-Gaussianity and the temporal structure of source signals. Maximizing the objective function, we can extract the desired FECG. Combining with the solution vector obtained by maximizing the objective function, we further improve the accuracy of the extracted FECG. In addition, the feasibility of the innovative methods is analyzed by mathematical derivation theoretically and the efficiency of the proposed approaches is illustrated with the computer simulations experimentally.