Techniques for the routine on-line processing of the fetal electrocardiogram.

In order to routinely monitor the fetal electrocardiogram (FECG), during labor, in an on-line real-time situation, the following processes need to be undertaken: The FECG signal must be recovered from noise. The recovered signal or waveform must be measured with a high degree of precision in order to generate the timing intervals, areas and parameters that are of interest to the clinician. The FECG and measured parameters must be presented to the clinician in a meaningful and simple format. Control of the machine and its processing should be a user friendly operation. In the current work, a system is described that uses digital filtering to recover the FECG waveform from low frequency biological noise and associated artifacts. A linear model of the FECG waveform is used to evaluate some 18 different timing intervals of the FECG. The enhanced waveform and accompanying parameters are displayed upon an intelligent graphics terminal to achieve a user friendly operation of the system by clinical staff.