Simulator of foetal phonocardiographic recordings and foetal heart rate calculator

Abstract

Nowadays, the classic diagnostic method to monitor general foetus well-being using the foetal heart rate conditions, ultrasonic cardiotography, is called into question. A valuable alternative is foetal phonocardiography, a passive and low-cost recording of foetal heart sounds. This paper presents a software which generates synthetic foetal phonocardiographic recordings simulating different recording conditions (by modifying noise level). From a real foetal phonocardiographic recording this software calculates the foetal heart rate. The software was developed using information picked from the literature especially for identifying the waveforms and characteristics of foetal and maternal heart sounds, and the different noises involved in real phonocardiographic recordings. Considering the possibility to simulate different recording situations and physiological or pathological foetal conditions just by modifying some parameters, this simulator software can be useful for testing different foetal-heart-rate extraction algorithms, like the authors' one. In this paper are presented the different postulates used for developing this software.