Fetal electrocardiogram enhancement in abdominal recordings: recording setup analysis

The fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) obtained from the abdominal signals, to monitor the wellbeing of the fetus, is a weak signal, recorded by placing electrodes on the maternal abdomen surface. When recording the abdominal fECG, the main problem is to separate the fECG from the background noise, including the maternal electrocardiogram (mECG) and/or the power line interference (PLI), this leading to an improved fECG signal to noise ratio (SNR). This paper proposes and evaluates three types of recording configurations, having different reference location, and analyzes the performance of each recording setup, based on the corresponding SNRs, quantitatively evaluated. The fECG extraction is carried out in order to evaluate the performance of each proposed configuration.