Extracting fetal heart signal from noisy maternal ECG by multivariate singular spectrum analysis

Fetal heart rate and its beat-to-beat variability are two important indications about the health and condition of the fetus. The observed maternal electrocardiogram (ECG) signal consists of mother heart signal and fetal heart signal and is often very noisy. In this paper, we propose a multivariate singular spectrum analysis (MSSA) for extracting and separating the mother heart signal, the fetal heart signal and the noise component from the combined ECGs. The proposed method is designed to cope with noisy recordings, which is an important limitation of several approaches proposed in the literature. To validate the proposed algorithm some noisy simulated signals are used. The performance of the technique is also examined using real-life signals.