QRStree: A prefix tree-based model to fetal QRS complexes detection

Fetal ECG Extraction from Maternal ECG using Attention-based CycleGAN

A non-invasive fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) is used to monitor the electrical pulse of the fetal heart. Decomposing the FECG signal from the maternal ECG (MECG) is a blind source separation problem, which is hard due to the low amplitude of the FECG, the overlap of R waves, and the potential exposure to noise from different sources. Traditional decomposition techniques, such as adaptive filters, require tuning, alignment, or pre-configuration, such as modeling the noise or desired signal to map the MECG to the FECG. The high correlation between maternal and fetal ECG fragments decreases the performance of convolution layers. Therefore, the masking region of interest based on the attention mechanism was performed to improve the signal generators' precision. The sine activation function was also used to retain more details when converting two signal domains. Three available datasets from the Physionet, including the A&D FECG, NI-FECG, and NI-FECG challenge, and one synthetic dataset using FECGSYN toolbox, were used to evaluate the performance. The proposed method could map an abdominal MECG to a scalp FECG with an average of 98% R-Square [CI 95%: 97%, 99%] as the goodness of fit on the A&D FECG dataset. Moreover, it achieved 99.7 % F1-score [CI 95%: 97.8-99.9], 99.6% F1-score [CI 95%: 98.2%, 99.9%] and 99.3% F1-score [CI 95%: 95.3%, 99.9%] for fetal QRS detection on the A&D FECG, NI-FECG and NI-FECG challenge datasets, respectively. Also, the distortion was in the very good and good ranges. These results are comparable to the state-of-the-art results; thus, the proposed algorithm has the potential to be used for high-performance signal-to-signal conversion.

Exploratory data analysis based efficient QRS-complex detection technique with minimal computational load

Detection of QRS-complex in the electrocardiogram (ECG) plays a decisive role in cardiac disorder detection. We face many challenges in terms of powerline interference, baseline drift, and abnormal varying peaks. In this work, we propose an exploratory data analysis (EDA) based efficient QRS-complex detection technique with minimal computational load. This paper includes median and moving average filter for pre-processing of the ECG. The peak of filtered ECG is enhanced to third power of the signal. The root mean square (rms) of the signal is estimated for the decision making rule. This technique adapted the new concept for isoelectric line identification and EDA based QRS-complex detection. In this paper, total 10,70,981 beats were used for validation from MIT BIH-Arrhythmia Database (MIT-BIH), Fantasia Database (FDB), European ST-T database (ESTD), a self recorded dataset (SDB), and fetal ECG database (FTDB). Overall sensitivity of 99.65 % and positive predictivity rate of 99.84 % have been achieved. The proposed technique doesn't require selection, setting, and training for QRS-complex detection. Thus, this paper presents a QRS-complex detection technique based on simple decision rules.