Template subtraction based methods for non-invasive fetal electrocardiography extraction

Abstract

Assessment of fetal heart rate (fHR) through non-invasive fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) is challenging task. This study compares the performance of five template subtraction (TS) methods on Labor (12 5-min recordings) and Pregnancy datasets (10 20-min recordings). The methods include TS without adaptation, TS using singular value decomposition (TSSVD), TS using linear prediction (TSLP), TS using scaling factor (TSSF), and sequential analysis (SA). The influence of the chosen maternal wavelet for the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) detector is also compared. The F1 score was used to measure performance. Each recording in both datasets consisted of four signals, resulting in a total comparison of 88 signals for the TS-based methods. The study reported the following results: F1 = 95.71% with TS, F1 = 95.93% with TSSVD, F1 = 95.30% with TS LP, F1 = 95.82% with TS SF, and F1 = 95.99% with SA. The study identified gaus3 as the suitable maternal wavelet for fetal R-peak detection using the CWT detector. Furthermore, the study classified signals from the tested datasets into categories of high, medium, and low quality, providing valuable insights for subsequent fECG signal extraction. This research contributes to advancing the understanding of non-invasive fECG signal processing and lays the groundwork for improving fetal monitoring in clinical settings.