Blind Maternal-Fetal ECG Separation Based on the Time-Scale Image TSI and SVD – ICA Methods

Fetal heart monitoring yields vital information about the fetus health and can support medical decision making in critical situations. A compound signal is obtained noninvasively by placing electrodes on the abdomen area of the mother which contains maternal and fetal ECG signals contaminated by various other signals from body and externally induced noises. As a result, the basic problem is to extract the fECG signal from the mixture of mECG and fECG, where the interfering mECG is a much stronger. This problem has been addressed in several works, in this paper, we propose a novel blind-source separation method to extract fetal ECG when given only a single channel recording. Our approach is based on the wavelet theory and SVD-ICA methods. It is pointed out that the presented algorithm is validated by Matlab simulation and can be implemented on real time life by using embedded system such as DSP processor.