OBJECTIVES This paper describes a methodology for the monitoring of the fetal cardiac health status during pregnancy, through the effective and non-invasive monitoring of the abdominal ECG signals (abdECG) of the mother. METHODS For this purpose, a three-stage methodology has been developed. In the first stage, the fetal heart rate (fHR) is extracted from the abdECG signals, using nonlinear a...

Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) extraction is very important procedure for fetal health assessment. In this article, we propose a fast one-unit independent component analysis with reference (ICA-R) that is suitable to extract the FECG. Most previous ICA-R algorithms only focused on how to optimize the cost function of the ICA-R and payed little attention to the improvement of cost function. They...

In biomedical engineering, to extract the fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) exactly is a significant and challenging research topic, and so it has been a hot field in biomedical research. Now, a variety of different methods have been proposed to address this problem. From the perspective of blind signal processing, FECG extraction can be modeled as Blind source separation (BSS). In this paper, we ...

This paper concerns the likely origin of three mutations with large effects on ovulation rate identified in the Belclare and Cambridge sheep breeds; two in the BMP15 gene (FecX(G) and FecX(B)) and the third (FecG(H)) in GDF9. All three mutations segregate in Belclare sheep while one, FecX(B), has not been found in the Cambridge. Both Belclare and Cambridge breeds are relatively recently develop...

Fetal monitoring during labour currently fails to accurately detect acidemia. We developed a method to assess the multidimensional properties of fetal heart rate variability (fHRV) from trans-abdominal fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) during labour. We aimed to assess this novel bioinformatics approach for correlation between fHRV and neonatal pH or base excess (BE) at birth.We enrolled a prospec...

Nowadays, ICA based methods are widely used. However, ICA needs multiples channels for collecting electrocardiogram signals. One of the most significant advantages of utilizing ANFIS networks in FECG extraction is that the methods require only two record signals, one thoracic signal and one abdominal ECG signal. In the present work, ANFIS network is apply to extract the FECG signal from both EC...

An electrocardiogram (ECG) signal contains the electrical activity generated by the contraction of heart muscles. An ECG signal can provide a lot of information about an individual's heart condition and health. That being said, principles of ECG analysis can also be applied to the electrocardiogram of a fetus (FECG) in order to accurately monitor heart development and health during the differen...

This paper evaluates the performance of some major Independent Component Analysis (ICA) algorithms like Hyv ̈arinen’s fixed point algorithm, Pearson based ICA algorithm and OGWE (Optimized Generalized Weighted Estimator) ICA algorithm in a biomedical blind source separation problem. Independent signals representing Fetal ECG (FECG) and Maternal ECG (MECG) generated and then mixed linearly to sim...