A novel technique for extraction of FECG using multi stage adaptive filtering

In this study, a two stage adaptive filtering along with the denosing technique to extract the FECG from the maternal abdominal signal is proposed. This method leads to enhancement of fetal ECG by canceling maternal ECG. The FECG extraction is from two ECG signals recorded at the thoracic and abdominal areas of the mother's skin. The thoracic ECG (TECG) is assumed to be almost completely maternal while the abdominal ECG (AECG) is considered to be composite as it contains both the mother's and fetus ECG signals. The proposed method is applied to real ECG signals to demonstrate its superior effectiveness and it is found to meet or exceed that of the published results using other techniques. The algorithm performance with sensitivity, positive predictivity and accuracy were calculated and the obtained results indicate high detection ability. © 2010 Asian Network for Scientific Information.