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Updated: Jul 20, 2025
Human Fetal Blood Flow Quantification with Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Motion Compensation
Published on: January 7, 2021
A new algorithm for fetal heart rate detection: Fractional order calculus approach
Ilija Tanasković1, Nadica Miljković2
1University of Belgrade - School of Electrical Engineering, Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 73, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia; Institute for Artificial Intelligence R&D, Fruskogorska 1, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia.
Objectives:
A new modified Pan-Tompkins' (mPT) method for fetal heart rate detection is presented. The mPT method is based on the hypothesis that optimal fractional order derivative and optimal window width of the moving average filter would enable efficient estimation of fetal heart rate from surface abdominal electrophysiological recordings with relatively low signal-to-noise ratios.
Methods:
The algorithm is tested on signals recorded from the abdomen of pregnant women available from the PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology Challenge database. Fetal heart rate detection is performed on 10-s long segments selected by the estimation of signal-to-noise ratios (the extravagance of the fetal QRS peak to its surroundings and to the whole signal; and the mean ratio of fetal and maternal QRS peaks) and on the manually selected segments.
Results:
The best results are obtained via criteria based on the extravagance of the fetal QRS peak to its surroundings that reached average sensitivity of 97%, positive predictive value of 97%, error rate of ∼3.5%, and F1 score of 97%. The obtained averaged optimal parameters for mPT are 0.51 for fractional order and 24.5 ms for the window width of the moving average filter.
Conclusion:
Proposed mPT algorithm showed satisfactory performance for fetal heart rate detection. Further adaptations of the presented mPT method could be used for peak detection in noisy environments in biomedical signal analysis in general.
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