Fetal electrocardiogram extraction by source subspace separation

Abstract

A high-precision method is presented for the extraction of the fetal electrocardiogram from multi-channel potential recordings on the mother's skin. First the problem is appropriately formulated in terms of blind source separation, where the sources can have a multidimensional nature. As a summary of preceding work it is shown how the fetal electrocardiogram can be reconstructed by means of second-order tools. However an extra higher-order processing step enhances the accuracy and allows to identify the transfer from source to electrode. The method is illustrated with an example. 1.