Artifact reduction in maternal abdominal ECG recordings for fetal ECG estimation

Monitoring the fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) is currently one of the most promising methods to assess fetal health. However, the main problem associated with this method is that the signals recorded from the maternal abdomen are affected by noise and interferences: the maternal electrocardiogram (mECG) being the dominant interference. In this paper a mECG removal technique is described, which is based on dynamic segmentation of the mECG and subsequent linear prediction of the mECG segments. Moreover, as the linear prediction is significantly affected by artifacts, a signal validation technique is presented to suppress the effect of artifacts on the mECG prediction. The performance of the presented technique is evaluated by comparison to the performance of three other mECG removal techniques: the presented technique outperforms the other techniques for all recordings.