An Efficient Algorithm for the Extraction of Fetal ECG from Standard and Non-Standard Multi Abdominal Maternal Leads

The importance of fetal surveillance during pregnancy is worldwide accepted since its peculiar ability to anticipate fetal distress under a variety of conditions. The novel frontier in the field of remote fetal monitoring relies on a continuous and everyday-monitoring of fetal wellbeing. As a consequence, fECG monitoring systems have seen a net increase in popularity in the recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for the detection of fECG and we validated its performances by testing it on an open source collection of 75 annotated fECG traces. Our results show the reliability of the proposed methodology in extracting fECG and deriving an estimate of fHR.