Review of electromagnetic source investigations of the fetal heart

There is at present no reliable clinical technique for the assessment of cardiac electrophysiological activity in the fetus. There are two primary requirements of this type of monitoring: (i) sequential assessment of morphological and temporal parameters of cardiac electrical activity during advancing gestation, and (ii) description of the cardiac electrical activity in terms of an electrophysiologically realistic model. Fetal electrocardiography may be performed using maternal abdominal electrodes but this is only reliable prior to the 27th week of gestation. This is primarily because of the electrically insulating effects of the vernix caseosa and the existence of preferred conduction pathways between the fetal heart and maternal abdomen after this time. Fetal magnetocardiography is largely unaffected by these factors and so enables a reliable assessment of fetal electrocardiological activity throughout the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. This method can also be used to model fetal electrophysiological activity in terms of a current dipole or magnetic dipole. The vectorcardiogram is a plot of the dynamic change in dipole parameters during the cardiac cycle, allowing the study of growth-related or pathology-related electromagnetic changes in the heart. Fetal magnetocardiography and the fetal vectorcardiogram may thus provide important additions to current methods of antenatal monitoring.